746 questions, five assistants, one tight top three: which Turkish furniture 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 five of them, 746 times, about furniture in Turkey. Here’s what they named, where they agreed, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”

Type “which Turkish furniture brand should I buy?” into ChatGPT and you’ll get a confident answer in seconds. Ask Gemini, Claude, Grok or Perplexity the same thing, and — unusually — you’ll get broadly the same names back. Furniture turns out to be a market where the AI assistants mostly agree, and that agreement is itself the story.

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 is one of the world’s furniture workshops. The country sits among the world’s top ten furniture exporters, according to Turkey’s Ministry of Trade, with furniture exports of roughly $4.6 billion in 2025 and a stated 2026 target of above $5 billion, per the İstanbul furniture-and-forest-products exporters’ association and figures carried by Anadolu Agency. The domestic market is larger still — about $23.8 billion in 2024 on the Ministry’s own sector estimate.

Much of that output flows through a handful of manufacturing hubs. İnegöl, near Bursa, brands itself as “Turkey’s furniture capital”: local authorities put the district at roughly a fifth of the country’s furniture exports, with 3,000-plus firms shipping to some 170 countries, and “İnegöl Mobilyası” is even a registered mark. Kayseri, the other giant, says it produces about half of Turkey’s chairs and seven in ten of its sofas. This is a deep, entrepreneurial industry with strong regional identities — which makes the question of who AI names a real one for thousands of makers.

The way people buy is shifting online and, increasingly, toward AI. Turkey’s online “home, garden, furniture and decoration” category reached about TL 215.6 billion in 2025, up roughly 50% year on year, according to the Ministry of Trade’s e-commerce report — with Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Vivense and Koçtaş among the most prominent places to shop. And AI is creeping into that journey: Google Türkiye’s Smart Shopper 2024 found 13% of shoppers had used chat-based AI tools somewhere in their shopping journey and 23% had used a retailer’s or brand’s chatbot, while globally Capgemini reported that 58% of consumers have begun replacing search engines with generative AI for product recommendations.

All of which makes one question pressing: as a large, hub-driven, increasingly online furniture industry competes for attention, who does AI actually name when a shopper asks for a recommendation? So we set out to measure that shelf. On 27 June 2026 we put the same 30 Turkish-language questions to five leading AI assistants — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity — asking each question five times, to every model: 746 usable answers.

Three brands showed up in almost every answer

The clearest pattern was concentration — and, this time, consensus. Three brands — İstikbal, Bellona and Doğtaş — each appeared in roughly half of all 746 answers, across all five assistants. İstikbal edged the top spot because it tends to be named earliest, though Bellona was actually mentioned slightly more often; Doğtaş was a close third. The three are entrenched national names: İstikbal (Erciyes Anadolu Holding), Bellona (Anadolu Güçbirliği Holding), and Doğtaş, which sits with Kelebek inside the listed Doğanlar furniture group.

Below that trio, the list dropped off a cliff: a 23-point gap to fourth-placed Kelebek. Of the 352 entities we tracked, only 28 were named often enough to rank at all in the overall cut. Visibility is not evenly distributed — a small group occupies most of the space, and a very long tail barely registers.

The current ranking: the top entities by AI visibility

Below are the entities that cleared the 5% mention threshold, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking, and it deliberately keeps the big retailers and marketplaces (Vivense, Trendyol, Koçtaş) in the list, because that’s the shelf shoppers actually meet. Tap a name to open its page.

For all 352 tracked entities, the three market cuts, the source analysis and the full methodology, see the current edition below.

The assistants mostly agree — but not on how much to say

You might expect five AI systems to diverge. On the leaders, they barely did: every assistant put İstikbal, Bellona and Doğtaş in its top three. Where they differed was in breadth. Grok named about ten brands per answer and Perplexity nine, reaching deep into the domestic long tail; Claude and ChatGPT’s mini model were far leaner, naming closer to four. So for a brand outside the big three, being named at all depends heavily on which assistant happens to be answering.

The Turkish shelf holds — even when we stop asking for it

We also asked the open question: when nothing forces a Turkish answer, do global brands take over? In furniture, no. Across the origin-neutral questions, 88% of answers still named a Turkish brand, versus 35% that named any foreign one. The one strong foreign exception was IKEA, which ranked fourth overall in that open comparison; beyond it, global names were scarce. Turkey’s furniture shelf, as AI sees it, is overwhelmingly domestic.

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, and often a strong, current website behind it. It does not mean the brand’s products are better built, longer lasting or better value. 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 leaderboards for all three market cuts (overall, yerli-only, and origin-neutral), 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 on the right side.

Frequently asked questions

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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.