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, 750 times, about furniture in Turkey. Here’s what they named, where they agreed, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”
Type “en iyi mobilya markası hangisi” into ChatGPT and you’ll get a confident answer in seconds. Ask Gemini, Claude, Grok or Perplexity the same thing and, unusually, the same few names come back at the top. Where the assistants differ is in how much else they say: Grok’s answers name 10.62 brands, retailers or marketplaces on average; Claude’s name 4.35. 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 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 measure that shelf every quarter. On 25 September 2026 we put the same 30 Turkish-language questions we asked in June to five leading AI assistants — Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Grok — asking each question five times: 750 answers.
The same three brands lead on every cut
İstikbal appeared in 53.47% of all 750 answers, was named by all five assistants, and tops the overall ranking with a score of 96.10. Bellona is actually named more often — in 58.53% of answers — and Doğtaş in 56.93%; İstikbal leads because it tends to be named earliest. Enza Home and Kelebek complete the top five.
The three leaders hold the top three places on every cut the report publishes: all questions, the questions that ask for Turkish brands, the questions that don’t, and each of the three question types. Two owners appear twice near the top — Kelebek and Doğtaş are both Doğanlar Mobilya Grubu brands, and Enza Home and Yataş both belong to Yataş Group — but the report ranks brands, not companies, and never adds two brands together.
Below the leaders the list thins out fast. Of 290 brands, retailers and marketplaces we tracked, 23 were named often enough to rank across all 30 questions — 22 domestic and one foreign, IKEA, in sixth place.
The current ranking
Below are the 23 brands, retailers and marketplaces that cleared the 5% mention threshold across all 30 questions, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking. The last column shows how much more or less often each one was named than in June.
| # | Entity | AI Score | Mention rate | Δ mention rate since June (points) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | İstikbal | 96.10 | 53.47% | +6.68 |
| 2 | Bellona | 94.64 | 58.53% | +8.00 |
| 3 | Doğtaş | 89.65 | 56.93% | +8.54 |
| 4 | Enza Home | 79.10 | 41.60% | +19.48 |
| 5 | Kelebek | 69.65 | 41.47% | +10.10 |
| 6 | IKEA | 67.19 | 24.13% | +5.23 |
| 7 | Lazzoni | 59.08 | 21.33% | +8.87 |
| 8 | Modalife | 53.07 | 15.20% | +4.48 |
| 9 | Çilek | 52.75 | 13.33% | +5.29 |
| 10 | Gündoğdu Mobilya | 52.16 | 8.13% | -5.81 |
| 11 | Vivense | 52.12 | 22.40% | +2.43 |
| 12 | Yataş | 51.51 | 18.53% | +7.41 |
| 13 | Masko | 47.80 | 8.67% | +1.96 |
| 14 | Mondi | 47.55 | 16.27% | +4.60 |
| 15 | Saloni Mobilya | 46.12 | 5.20% | +3.73 |
| 16 | Modoko | 45.15 | 8.93% | +0.89 |
| 17 | Koçtaş | 43.22 | 6.53% | -5.67 |
| 18 | Koleksiyon | 42.97 | 8.80% | +6.25 |
| 19 | Alfemo | 39.93 | 7.07% | +1.97 |
| 20 | Trendyol | 39.53 | 12.13% | -7.17 |
| 21 | Loda | 39.25 | 5.87% | +2.25 |
| 22 | Mudo Concept | 36.91 | 5.33% | +4.53 ⚠ |
| 23 | Hepsiburada | 33.22 | 8.00% | +0.09 |
Four of the entries above — Masko, Modoko, Trendyol and Hepsiburada — are marketplaces rather than brands; the full report includes a brand-only view, the separate leaderboards for questions that do and don’t ask for Turkish brands, and the full Turkish-versus-foreign breakdown.
The Turkish shelf holds — even when we stop asking for it
Thirteen of our 30 questions ask for Turkish brands explicitly, the way a shopper would: “türk malı mobilya markası arıyorum, hangileri iyi.” The other seventeen ask about the product and say nothing about origin: “en iyi mobilya markası hangisi.”
When the question asks for Turkish brands, domestic brands take 100.00% of the qualifying mentions and foreign brands 0.00%, with origin known for every one of them; no foreign brand is named often enough to qualify. When the question says nothing about origin, domestic brands still take 86.63% and foreign brands 13.37% — again with origin known for every qualifying mention. The strongest foreign name is IKEA, fourth on that shelf and named in 40.94% of those answers; three other foreign brands qualify further down.
June’s edition reported a different figure for the origin-neutral questions: the share of answers that named at least one Turkish brand. That is a different measure, and June also decided a brand’s origin by a different rule — founded and headquartered in Turkey — while this edition uses the country the brand is run from. So the two are not compared.
What changed since June
This is the second edition, so for the first time we can look at movement — with one caution stated up front: two of the five assistants changed. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and GPT-4o-mini answered in June; Gemini 3.6 Flash and ChatGPT 5.6 Luna Pro answered in September. The 30 questions were identical.
On those questions, Enza Home gained the most, from 22.12% of June’s answers to 41.60% of September’s (+19.48 points), followed by Kelebek (+10.10) and Lazzoni (+8.87); all three leaders rose too. Sivriler Mobilya fell the most (-8.32), followed by Trendyol (-7.17) and Gündoğdu Mobilya (-5.81), which still ranks tenth. Of the 199 names that appeared in both editions, 90 were named more often and 102 less often.
Enza Home is named by the assistants that joined this edition and by the three that answered both times, so its current visibility does not rest only on the newcomers; Lazzoni’s current visibility leans much more on the newcomers. Neither can be sized precisely, which is why we read these changes as direction rather than exact size. June’s figures here are June’s answers counted the way this edition counts, so for some names — above all the marketplaces — they differ from what June’s page showed.
The assistants agree on the leaders, not on how much to say
At the top the five assistants largely agree: İstikbal, Bellona and Doğtaş are in every assistant’s top five, and Bellona is the most-named brand for three of them. Below that they differ sharply in breadth. Grok was the most generous, naming 10.62 brands, retailers or marketplaces in a typical answer, with Gemini at 9.79; Claude (4.35) was the most selective. The more names an assistant lists, the more likely a smaller maker is to make the cut.
Grok also names the marketplaces far more than the others do. Of Trendyol’s 91 mentions across all five assistants, 60 came from Grok; of Hepsiburada’s 60, 44 did. Both marketplaces’ places in the ranking largely reflect one assistant’s habit of pointing to where to buy.
Most answers were built with a web search
Every assistant was asked to search the web, and 84.13% of answers show that they did. Four of the five grounded every answer. Gemini grounded 20.67%; the rest of its answers came back with no information about whether it searched, which is not the same as answering from memory. The sites cited most widely were the leaders’ own: bellona.com.tr and istikbal.com.tr, each in 46 of the 150 question-and-assistant combinations (30.67%), followed by dogtas.com (41).
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 one thing: there is a lot of information available about that brand. It does not mean the brand’s products are better built, longer lasting or better value. 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.
Read the full report
This page is a summary. The complete report contains the full ranking and the brand-only view, the separate leaderboards for questions that do and don’t ask for Turkish brands, the Turkish-versus-foreign breakdown, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the winners by question type, the comparison with June 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.
Frequently asked questions
Across all 30 questions, İstikbal leads with a 96.10 score, appearing in 53.47% of 750 answers and named by all five assistants. Bellona is named more often, in 58.53% of answers, and Doğtaş is third. The same three hold the top three places on every cut.
Mostly Turkish, however the question is phrased. On the 13 questions that ask for Turkish brands, domestic brands take 100.00% of qualifying mentions and foreign brands 0.00%. On the 17 questions that say nothing about origin, they take 86.63% and 13.37%, with IKEA the strongest foreign name. Origin is known for every qualifying mention on both.
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.
On the leaders, largely: İstikbal, Bellona and Doğtaş are in every assistant's top five. On length, no: Grok names 10.62 brands, retailers or marketplaces per answer and Claude 4.35. Grok also accounts for most of the marketplace mentions — 60 of Trendyol's 91 and 44 of Hepsiburada's 60.
Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini 3.6 Flash, ChatGPT 5.6 Luna Pro, Perplexity Sonar and Grok 4.3 were each asked the same 30 Turkish-language questions five times on 25 September 2026, producing 750 answers. 290 brands, retailers and marketplaces were tracked in total.
The 30 questions were the same, but two of the five assistants were replaced, so changes show direction rather than exact size. Measured by how often each brand was named, Enza Home gained the most (+19.48 points) and Sivriler Mobilya lost the most (-8.32). The Turkish-versus-foreign figures are not compared with June's, because June used a different measure and a different rule for deciding a brand's origin.
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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