A day after Airtel’s strategic offer of a free Perplexity Pro subscription was made public, the Perplexity app has seen a record number of downloads, especially on iOS. The Airtel promotional offer has pushed the AI search engine to the top of the App Store in India, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This achievement was shared by Perplexity AI’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, via his LinkedIn post.
Perplexity AI, which has had the app on the App Store for months now, has remained among the top dedicated AI apps for mobile phone users. The app allows access to Perplexity’s all free and Pro features, including the Labs features too. Despite being available as an AI-based web search engine, it was never able to beat OpenAI’s ChatGPT app in the app store listings.
Perplexity AI app beats ChatGPT on App Store
After Airtel announced its mega partnership with Perplexity AI to offer a year’s subscription to Perplexity AI Pro for free, a lot of Airtel subscribers availed of the deal. The Perplexity AI Pro subscription is extremely beneficial to students, researchers, professionals and teachers. The annual subscription to the Pro tier costs Rs 17,000 in India when purchased directly from Perplexity.
With the Airtel deal, a year’s subscription is now available for free, thus encouraging more people to opt in and try it out. This move has resulted in many subscribers downloading the app via App Stores, since the app is the easiest way to access the AI model. Additionally, Perplexity AI Pro can also be accessed via the Safari or Chrome browsers if the app is not your preference.
The company’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, took to LinkedIn to confirm the achievement.
What does Perplexity AI Pro offer?
As part of the offer, all Airtel mobile, broadband, or DTH customers in India can claim the free annual 12-month subscription. Users can redeem it directly through the Airtel Thanks app by following a few steps.
Perplexity Pro offers a suite of advanced features, with access to the latest AI models like Claude, xAI’s Grok 4, and GPT-4.1. The Pro subscription also includes image generation, deep research functionalities, and file analysis via uploads.
