540 questions, four assistants, no single answer: which Turkish cosmetic brands does AI actually name?

More and more shoppers are skipping the search bar and simply asking an AI assistant what to buy. So we asked four of them, 540 times about cosmetics in Turkey. Here’s what they named, where they disagreed, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”

Type “recommend me a good Turkish skincare brand” into ChatGPT, and you’ll get a confident, friendly answer in seconds. Ask Gemini the same thing, and you’ll get another confident answer, but maybe a different list. Ask Claude, and the brand at the top might be one neither of the others put first.

This is the quiet shift happening in how people find products. Discovery is moving from the search engine, where you scroll a page of links and decide for yourself, to the AI assistant, where a single answer arrives pre-sorted. When the assistant names three brands, those three brands have effectively been placed on a shelf at eye level and everything else is in the back of the store.

Why this is worth paying attention to

Turkey’s cosmetics sector is in the middle of a boom, and an unusually entrepreneurial one. According to Ministry of Trade data, 27.2% of Turkey’s e-commerce small-business owners are women, and women account for 58% of all marketplace e-commerce spending, with personal care and cosmetics among the categories where they spend most. Cosmetics is named explicitly in the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) Rising Brands Project as a field where women entrepreneurs are encouraged to build brands.

The momentum is visible abroad, too. Turkish cosmetics exports reached $2.33 billion in 2025, with a stated 2026 target of $2.5 billion, according to a February 2026 Hürriyet Daily News report; which also noted that the number of registered brands has quadrupled in five years to around 12,000. The rise, increasingly described as “Turkish Beauty,” suggests Turkey is now known not only for manufacturing capacity but for brand stories of its own.

All of which makes one question pressing: as a wave of new, often small and frequently women-led cosmetics brands competes for attention, who does AI actually name when a shopper asks for a recommendation? So we set out to measure that shelf. Over two days in late May 2026, we put the same 27 Turkish-language questions to four leading AI assistants: Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. We asked each question five times, to every model: 540 answers and more than 4,000 brand mentions.

One brand showed up in more than half of every answer

The clearest pattern was concentration. A single brand The Purest Solutions appeared in 54% of all 540 answers, across all four assistants. It led the field by a wide margin, with the established makeup houses: Golden Rose, Flormar, Pastel and Farmasi, rounding out the top five.

Below that handful, the list thinned out fast. Of 138 brands we tracked, only 31 were named often enough to rank at all. Visibility is not evenly distributed: a small group of brands occupies most of the space, and a very long tail barely registers.

The current ranking: the top 31 Turkish brands by AI visibility

Below are the 31 Turkish brands that cleared the 5% mention threshold, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking. Tap a brand name to open its page.

For all 138 tracked brands, the methodology and the category breakdowns, see the current edition below.

The assistants don’t see the same market

You might assume four AI systems trained on broadly similar data would converge on roughly the same answer. They didn’t. Grok was the most generous, naming nearly ten different Turkish brands in a typical answer. Claude was the most selective, naming closer to six, and Claude was the only one of the four to put a different brand first. Where the others led with The Purest Solutions, Claude led with Farmasi.

”Web search” and “memory” produce different winners

Not every AI answer is built the same way. Sometimes the assistant searches the live web; sometimes it answers from memory. In answers grounded in web search, The Purest Solutions led comfortably (60%). But in answers drawn from memory alone, that same brand nearly vanished and Farmasi rose to the top instead. Claude, which searched the web less often than the others, leaned on memory more, which is exactly why Farmasi came out on top for it.

The most important finding isn’t a ranking

Here’s the thing we’d most like readers to take away: being recommended by AI does not mean a brand is good. When an assistant names a brand often, it usually means one thing; there is a lot of information available about that brand. It does not mean the brand’s products are higher quality, safer or more effective. In other words, AI visibility measures how easily a brand is found, not how good it is.

Read the full report

This article is a summary. The complete report contains the full 31-brand leaderboard, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the category-by-category winners, the source analysis, and the full methodology. This is the first edition of a study we’ll repeat every quarter, you’ll find the current and past editions listed below.

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About this study: Herm.io is a consumer-behavior and marketing-data company. We don’t sell SEO or AI-ranking services, no brand paid to appear in the report, and a brand’s score is a measure of visibility only, not an endorsement. To keep the analysis neutral, we also excluded any AI citations to Herm.io’s own pages from the source data. Brands curious about where they sit in the data are welcome to book a call for a neutral walkthrough of the findings; it’s free and there’s nothing to buy.