997 answers, five assistants, one vertical: which evening & occasion wear brands does AI actually name in Turkey?

More and more shoppers are skipping the search bar and the marketplace filter and simply asking an AI assistant what to buy. So we asked five of them, 997 times, about evening and occasion wear (abiye and davet dresses) in Turkey. Here’s what they named, how Turkish and foreign brands split the shelf, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”

Type “abiye elbise önerisi” into ChatGPT, and you’ll get a confident answer in seconds. Ask Gemini for a good Turkish brand for a henna night, and you’ll get another tidy list. Ask Grok, and you’ll get nearly ten names where Claude might give you three or four. Discovery is moving from the search engine and the marketplace grid, where you scroll and decide for yourself, to the AI assistant, where a single answer arrives pre-sorted. When an assistant names three brands, those three are what the shopper sees; everything else effectively disappears.

Why this is worth paying attention to

Evening and occasion wear sits on top of one of the region’s largest garment-manufacturing bases, even though “abiye” is rarely broken out as its own line in official trade data. Turkey exported about $16.8 billion of apparel in 2025, a sector heavily oriented toward Europe, which took 59.6% of those exports (İHKİB). Women’s apparel alone, the closest official proxy for dresses and eveningwear, accounted for roughly $5.5 billion, or 29.5% of ready-to-wear exports (İHKİB). Globally, occasion wear is a niche inside a much larger formal-and-bridal ecosystem: market researchers estimate the broad occasionwear category at around $25 billion and the narrower evening-gown segment near $2.3 billion (Verified Market Reports; Cognitive Market Research), while the adjacent global wedding-wear market is put at roughly $82 billion (Grand View Research). That gap helps explain why the foreign names that surface in this study cluster in couture and bridal rather than everyday dresses. (These sector sizes are market-research estimates with inconsistent definitions; treat them as context, not precise measures.)

Discovery for all of it is going digital, and increasingly AI-mediated. In Turkey, clothing, shoes and accessories were the single largest online-retail category in 2025 at ₺428.7 billion, with e-commerce already 25.4% of that category’s trade (Ministry of Trade / ETBİS). Meanwhile the discovery layer itself is shifting: Adobe found AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites up 138% year over year in May 2026, and up 393% in the first quarter, with 39% of consumers saying they had used an AI assistant to shop, 85% of those saying it improved the experience, and half saying they click the links an assistant surfaces (Adobe; Adobe). The behaviour is measurable in Turkey too. TÜİK reports 19.2% of individuals used generative AI in 2025, rising to 39.4% among 16–24-year-olds (TÜİK), and McKinsey projects AI agents could mediate $3–5 trillion of consumer commerce by 2030 (McKinsey).

All of which makes one question pressing: as shoppers move to AI assistants, who do those assistants actually name when someone in Turkey asks for an abiye or a davet dress? So we set out to measure that shelf. Over a single run on 4 July 2026, we put the same 40 Turkish-language questions to five leading AI assistants (GPT-4o-mini, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok), asking each question five times, for 997 usable answers about evening and occasion wear.

A Turkish-led shelf, and a marketplace-led one

The clearest finding is that this market is overwhelmingly Turkish. When we isolated the 20 origin-neutral questions, the only fair basis for comparing Turkish and foreign brands, mentions split 82% Turkish to 18% foreign, the most one-sided balance we’ve measured in any vertical. The foreign names that do appear cluster in a premium niche: bridal and couture houses like Pronovias, Chanel, Elie Saab and Valentino, plus the fast-fashion outliers Zara and Forever New. And when a question explicitly asks for yerli (Turkish) brands, the shelf is entirely domestic: all 33 qualifying brands in that cut are Turkish, not a single foreign name.

A second finding: the shelf is led by marketplaces, not a hero brand. Trendyol appeared in 47.7% of all answers and tops the overall ranking, with the marketplace Sefamerve also near the top. The most visible standalone brand is Carmen (second overall), followed by a cluster of Turkish occasion-wear specialists such as adL and AlfaBeta. Below the leaders, each list thins out fast: of 191 brands we tracked, only 33 were named often enough to rank in the main market.

The main ranking

Below are the brands that cleared the 5% mention threshold across all 40 questions, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking.

Several of the entries above (Trendyol, Sefamerve, Modanisa, Hepsiburada and Boyner) are marketplaces or retailers rather than brands. The full report includes a brand-only view, a separate “yerli-only” (local) leaderboard, the open-market Turkish-vs-foreign breakdown, and the winners by question type.

The assistants don’t all list the same number of brands

You might assume five AI systems would converge on the same answer. At the very top they largely did: Trendyol leads every model, with Carmen the most consistent runner-up. But they differed sharply in breadth. Grok was the most generous, naming nearly 9.9 brands in a typical answer, while GPT-4o-mini and Claude were the most selective, closer to 4. The more brands an assistant lists, the more likely a smaller or newer label is to make the cut, and the more often a marketplace, rather than a brand, gets named first.

Nearly every answer used a web search

Almost all of these answers, about 97.7%, were built by searching the live web rather than from memory alone. For Turkish evening- and occasion-wear questions, the assistants reach for current web content almost every time. And when they do, they lean first on brands’ own websites: about 65.5% of all the sources they cited were official brand sites, with the marketplace trendyol.com the single most-cited domain (named by 58.5% of responses). A current, well-organised web presence is closely tied to whether a brand shows up.

The most important finding isn’t a ranking

Here’s what 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 just that a lot of information is available about that brand. It does not mean the brand’s dresses fit better, last longer, cost less, or look more elegant. AI visibility measures how easily a brand is found, not how good it is. Shoppers should not read an AI recommendation, or this report, as a verdict on quality.

Frequently asked questions

Read the full report

This page is a summary. The complete report contains the full main, local (yerli) and open leaderboards, the brand-only view, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the winners by question type, the Turkish-vs-foreign open-market analysis, 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 on the right.

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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.