Google and Airtel Partner to Tackle RCS Spam in India

Google is turning to India’s telecom infrastructure to tackle persistent spam on Rich Communication Services (RCS), starting with a new partnership with Bharti Airtel.

Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator with more than 463 million subscribers, announced that it has integrated its network-level spam filtering directly into Google’s RCS ecosystem in the country. The goal is to tighten protections against unwanted messages and fraud on RCS, which in India is largely accessed via the Google Messages app.

The move reflects a deeper alignment between Google and a major carrier around RCS, a standard the company has been promoting as the successor to SMS. In May 2025, Google said RCS was handling more than a billion messages daily in the U.S., based on a 28-day average, underscoring the protocol’s growing role in everyday messaging.

India, however, has proven to be a difficult market for spam and fraud across messaging platforms. Its massive mobile user base, rapid expansion of digital payments, and aggressive enterprise marketing have created fertile ground for unsolicited and fraudulent messages.

Those challenges have been especially visible on RCS. In 2022, complaints about unsolicited ads on Google’s RCS service in India grew serious enough that Google temporarily paused business promotions on the platform in the country. Despite that intervention, users have continued to report frustration with spam on Google Messages, indicating that earlier measures did not fully resolve the issue.

Airtel said it had been wary of embracing RCS more deeply until it could bring that traffic under its own spam controls.

“We had not onboarded Google because we first wanted RCS messages to be routed through the Airtel spam filter,” an Airtel spokesperson said, highlighting the operator’s concerns about rising fraud risks.

Under the new partnership, Airtel’s network intelligence is being combined with Google’s RCS platform to perform real-time checks on business messaging. That includes verifying senders, detecting spam, and enforcing users’ do-not-disturb (DND) preferences before messages reach end users.

Airtel has described the integration as a “global first” for plugging a telecom operator’s spam filtering directly into an over-the-top (OTT) messaging platform, although neither Airtel nor Google provided comparative details to back that claim.

Google is presenting the Airtel partnership as part of a broader strategy to shore up trust in RCS through closer collaboration with carriers.

“We are committed to continuing to work with the broader ecosystem of carriers to create a consistent and trusted messaging experience for RCS users around the world,” Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem at Google, said in a statement.

The comment suggests Google sees the Airtel integration as a template it could adapt with other operators, even though the company has not announced similar deals elsewhere. Google also has not shared any estimates of how much the Airtel tie-up could reduce spam or fraud on RCS in India.

Industry analysts view the move as an attempt to fix structural weaknesses in rich messaging platforms that have made them attractive targets for spammers and scammers.

Prabhu Ram, vice president for the industry research group at CyberMedia Research, said the deeper carrier integration points to efforts to address longstanding vulnerabilities.

“The efficacy of this partnership should be reflected in metrics such as reductions in spam volume, user complaints, and fraud incidence, as well as improvements in engagement with legitimate messages,” Ram told TechCrunch.

For Airtel, the RCS collaboration builds on a broader anti-spam campaign. The operator says its AI-led systems have blocked more than 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam messages over the past year, contributing to what it describes as nearly a 69% drop in fraud-related financial losses on its network. Those figures suggest carriers can meaningfully curb abuse when they apply network-level controls at scale.

Bringing that same layer of intelligence into Google’s RCS traffic is intended to give users a more consistent line of defence, especially for business and promotional messages that have historically been exploited by spammers.

Whether this new integration significantly changes the on-the-ground experience for Indian users will likely be judged on the same metrics Ram highlighted: visible drops in spam and fraud, fewer complaints, and stronger engagement with legitimate brands relying on RCS.

Google, for now, is not saying when or if similar carrier-level filters will be built into RCS in other markets, or which operators it might work with next. But as RCS scales globally, the Airtel deal shows Google is increasingly willing to lean on carriers’ existing anti-spam infrastructure rather than trying to police abuse on its own.