Perplexity users are being redirected to Google Gemini on web, here’s why

Perplexity

Several users in India have reported that they are being redirected to its direct rival – Google Gemini when they are trying to access Perplexity on the web – more precisely, the India domain of the popular AI chatbot. What this means is that if you enter ‘www.perplexity.in’ in the URL bar of any browser, it will redirect you to Google Gemini and not to Perplexity’s official website, which is ‘perplexity.ai’. It is important to note that entering 'perplexity.ai' opens the official Perplexity website, and there's no change in that.

Why is this happening?

Well, Perplxity certainly does not own the ‘Perplxity.in’ domain, which ideally should be the AI chatbot’s India-specific website. However, that’s not the case here. Perplexity uses ‘.ai’ domain instead, and it does not have any country-specific domains - be it the United Kingdom (.uk), France (.fr), Canada (.ca), Germany (.de) or any other country.

It is also important to note that the problem exists only with Perplxity.ai domain, as we tried ‘perplexity.cn’, perplexity.fr, perplexity.fr, etc and all of them are returning the error. Also, the ‘perplexity.com’ redirects to the ‘perplexity.ai’, which ideally all other URLs should do.

But, that’s not happening here and perplexity.in is redirecting to Google Gemini. Now, this does not mean Google owns this domain, as there’s no official information available regarding the same. We also checked several domain databases and there’s no information available if ‘perplexity.in’ has been bought by anyone as of now.

Not the first time

Back in March 2024, opening ‘ai.com’ was getting redirected to Google Gemini. However, that issue got fixed after a while and current, ai.com does not redirect to Gemini. We expect there’s some sort of glitch which could get fixed.