Google on Tuesday launched a mobile recharge facility in its Search option for prepaid mobile users in India. Google Search will now enable users to browse plans across several mobile carriers, compare discounts and offers, and recharge these plans using payment options. This search experience is currently available for users those have signed-in using their Android devices, and provides prepaid service plans from Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Jio and BSNL across India. It’s a useful feature from Google, but the limitation to Android will disappoint a lot of users. The implementation of this feature to Google Search shows how big is prepaid recharge business in India.
How to Use Google Search for Mobile Recharge
In order to use this feature, Android phone users need to be signed-in to their devices. Users will need to type for a search query like ‘’sim recharge”, “mobile prepaid recharge” or other similar queries on their Android devices. The search result will then show a Mobile Recharge section wherein users get to feed their relevant information like phone number, operator, circle and then hit “Browse plans”.
In this section, your primary mobile number is already entered in the mobile number field, along with the operator name and the circle. Google will then show all the prepaid plans available by that particular operator and the preferred plan can be chosen from this list.
Following this, the users are taken to the payment page where a list of valid offers from all the compatible payment providers who can fulfil the selected plan. The list of payment providers includes Google Pay, FreeCharge, Mobikwik and Paytm.
The user can then tap the provider to complete the recharge through the service provider’s app or mobile website. Tapping on any of the options will either open the respective app (if installed) or their website.
The operators currently listed are BSNL, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Reliance Jio Infocomm. Google will be bringing more carrier partners and payment provider options in the future, but for now, we all know these are the major telecom operators in India.
It is worth noting all these features were already available for Google Pay app. This move is now beneficial to all users considering not everyone is registered with the mobile payment apps like Google Pay, Paytm, and so on.