AI battle plays out in India with Perplexity giveaway, Google’s free upgrade

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

The push notification arrived quietly one morning in July on Airtel’s bright-red mobile app. The Indian telecom company had a tantalising offer for its 360 million subscribers: Perplexity Pro, the artificial intelligence-powered search engine, was available free for a year. All they had to do was click on the “Activate” button.

Perplexity’s giveaway, which otherwise costs about $200 a year, came on the heels of an offer from rival Google just days earlier: a free, one-year upgrade to its Google AI Pro suite for every college student in India, with access to the Gemini AI model, the Notebook LLM tool, and an early-access coding co-pilot.

These moves, in the world’s most populous country, are just the most recent in the pitched battle for a piece of the fast-growing market for AI-powered search. Following the launch of ChatGPT and its quick adoption worldwide, big tech firms including Meta, Microsoft, and Google have scrambled to push their own alternatives, even as challengers such as Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Dia have entered the fray to redefine search with generative AI. OpenAI is also preparing to launch its own browser.

With China out of bounds for most Silicon Valley firms, India is both a...

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