This summary reflects the September 2026 edition (edition 2). Earlier editions are listed with the current one and keep their own figures.
More and more shoppers are skipping the search bar and simply asking an AI assistant what to buy. So we asked five of them, 1,125 times, about cosmetics in Turkey. Here’s what they named, what changes the answer, 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. Now delete the word “Turkish” and ask again. The list you get back may not contain a single Turkish brand.
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 early September 2026, we put 45 Turkish-language questions to five leading AI assistants: Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity. We asked each question five times, of every model: 1,125 answers and more than 10,500 brand mentions.
One word changes the entire answer
The strongest finding in this edition is not about any brand. It is about the question.
Twenty-two of our 45 questions ask for Turkish brands explicitly, the way a shopper would: “kaliteli ve yerli cilt bakımı markaları arıyorum.” The other twenty-three ask about the product and say nothing about origin: “en iyi makyaj bazı hangi marka,” “kalıcı mat ruj önerisi.”
Same assistants, same week, two completely different markets.
When the question specifies Turkish brands, Turkish brands take 98.3% of the qualifying mentions, 38 of the 40 brands that qualify are Turkish, and the leader, The Purest Solutions, is named in 51.8% of those answers. When the question doesn’t, Turkish brands take 30.8%, and the five most-named brands are Maybelline New York, La Roche-Posay, L’Oréal Paris, Estée Lauder and Bioderma; all foreign. The first Turkish name is Flormar, in sixth.
There is a pattern inside that. Turkish makeup travels: Flormar, Golden Rose, Pastel and Note Cosmetics all hold their place on the origin-neutral shelf. Turkish skincare, which dominates when the question invites it, largely does not. Maruderm, Cosmed and Dermoskin sit near the top of the domestic list and near the bottom of the open one.
One brand still leads, but the field has closed in
A single brand, The Purest Solutions, appeared in 33.2% of all 1,125 answers, across all five assistants, and holds first place. Golden Rose and Flormar follow. Then, in fourth and fifth, come Maybelline New York and La Roche-Posay; the first time foreign brands have appeared this high on this series’ main board.
Below the top handful the list thins out fast. Of 322 brands and retailers we tracked, only 53 were named often enough to rank at all, and 30 of those 53 are Turkish. Visibility is not evenly distributed: a small group occupies most of the space, and a very long tail barely registers.
The current ranking: the 20 most visible brands
Below are the 20 highest-scoring brands across all 45 questions, of any origin, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking.
For the full 53-brand leaderboard, the Turkish-only board, all 322 tracked brands, the methodology and the category breakdowns, see the current edition below.
The assistants don’t see the same market
You might assume five AI systems trained on broadly similar data would converge on roughly the same answer. They don’t. Grok was the most generous, naming around fifteen brands in a typical answer. Claude was the most selective, naming closer to six, and it knows almost exactly as many brands as Grok does; it simply chooses to say fewer of them.
Claude also stands apart on substance. It is the only assistant of the five whose most-named brand is not Turkish: it leads with L’Oréal Paris, and names The Purest Solutions, the overall leader, in fewer than one answer in twelve.
What changed since May
This is the second edition, so for the first time we can look at movement. On the 27 questions we repeated word for word from May, 43 brands rose and 60 fell. The largest gains went to mid-sized Turkish names: Maruderm rose from 24% to 40% of those answers, and Bioxcin roughly doubled. The largest falls went to two brands that were in May’s top ten: Farmasi and Atelier Rebul.
One caution we’d rather state than bury: the assistants themselves changed between editions. Four of the five providers shipped new versions, and one moved to a different model tier entirely, so the direction of these movements is more reliable than their exact size. The full report explains precisely how much of Farmasi’s fall we can and cannot attribute to the brand.
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 53-brand leaderboard and the Turkish-only board, the breakdown for each of the five AI assistants, the question-type and product-category winners, the trend against May 2026, the source analysis, and the full methodology. This is the second edition of a study we repeat every quarter; you’ll find the current and past editions listed on the right side.
Frequently asked questions
Across all 45 questions, The Purest Solutions leads with a 93.92 score, appearing in 33.2% of 1,125 answers and named by all five assistants. Golden Rose, Flormar, Maybelline New York and La Roche-Posay complete the top five.
It depends on how the question is phrased. When the question asks for Turkish brands, Turkish brands take 98.3% of the qualifying mentions. When the question says nothing about origin, they take 30.8% and the five most-named brands are all foreign.
No. A high AI visibility score means these systems have a lot of information available about a brand and surface it readily. It does not measure quality, durability, price or reliability. Visibility is about how easily a brand is found, not how good it is.
No. Grok names about 15 brands per answer while Claude names about 6, and Claude is the only one of the five whose most-named brand is not Turkish; it leads with L'Oreal Paris while the overall leader appears in fewer than one in twelve of its answers.
Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity were each asked the same 45 Turkish-language questions five times, on 4-5 September 2026, producing 1,125 answers.
On the 27 questions repeated word for word, 43 brands rose and 60 fell. Maruderm gained the most, from 24% to 40% of those answers, and Farmasi lost the most. The leaderboard also shows each brand's score change since May; because the question set grew from 27 to 45 and the panel from four assistants to five, those changes show direction rather than exact size.
About Herm.io & disclosure
Herm.io is a consumer behaviour and marketing data company. We study how people discover and choose brands to help businesses reach the right customers. This report forms part of our public research and is conducted quarterly.
Disclosure & neutrality
The rankings and metrics in this report are entirely impartial and are based on the methodology described within the report. No brand can pay or provide sponsorship to be included in the report, improve its ranking or influence how it is described in the content.
A brand’s score in the report is not an endorsement or assessment of quality; it is solely a measure of its current visibility within AI models. No service or product offered by Herm.io is sold for the purpose of directly changing the results of this report or guaranteeing a ranking. To preserve objectivity, all references to Herm.io’s own domain are removed from the source data before analysis. This ensures that the company does not appear in, measure itself through or benefit from its own study.
Brands seeking to understand their position in the data can schedule a consultation for an impartial assessment of the findings. The consultation is advisory and free of charge.
Mert Can Elkaya
Contributor
I'm a product builder working at the intersection of product, fintech, and growth. From martech and venture capital to leading product at a proptech platform and co-founding a fintech startup, I help teams—and shoppers—make smarter, more confident decisions.
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