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, 1,117 times, about underwear, socks and swimwear 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 “hangi marka iç giyim önerirsin” into ChatGPT, and you’ll get a confident answer in seconds. Ask Gemini for a good Turkish sock brand, 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 the assistant names three brands, those three have effectively been placed on a shelf at eye level, and everything else is in the stockroom.
Why this is worth paying attention to
This is a large, export-heavy corner of Turkish manufacturing. Globally, the lingerie market alone was worth roughly $98.7 billion in 2025 and is forecast to keep growing at about 7% a year (Grand View Research). Hosiery is where Turkey’s weight is clearest: the country is the world’s second-largest sock exporter, shipping about $864 million of socks in the first nine months of 2024, with Germany alone taking 22.4% ($193 million), while the domestic Turkish socks market is valued at roughly $223 million in 2025, or about 3.3 pairs per person (Kohan Textile Journal, citing Statista and export data). Underwear, socks and swimwear together sit on top of one of the largest textile and ready-to-wear bases in the region.
Discovery for all of it is increasingly AI-mediated. Adobe, tracking more than a trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, found generative-AI-driven traffic up roughly 4,700% year on year by July 2025, with 38% of surveyed shoppers saying they had used generative AI to shop and 52% planning to (Adobe). Over the 2025 holiday season, AI referrals rose nearly seven-fold year on year and converted about 31% better than other traffic, a signal that assistants are becoming discovery and comparison interfaces, not just a novelty (Adobe). Personal-care and apparel categories are squarely in that shift.
All of which makes one question pressing: as shoppers move to AI assistants, who do those assistants actually name when someone asks for underwear, socks or a swimsuit in Turkey? So we set out to measure that shelf. Over a single run on 19–20 June 2026, we put the same 45 Turkish-language questions to five leading AI assistants, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, asking each question five times: 1,117 usable answers across innerwear, hosiery and beachwear.
A Turkish-led shelf, but a contested one
The clearest finding is that this market is Turkish-led without being Turkish-only. Penti appeared in 41% of all answers across the five assistants and tops the overall ranking, with Ayyıldız a clear second; both are Turkish. But when we isolated the 22 origin-neutral questions, the only fair basis for comparing Turkish and foreign brands, mentions split 59% Turkish to 41% foreign, the closest balance we’ve measured in any vertical. Foreign names like Marks & Spencer, Intimissimi, Calzedonia and Victoria’s Secret are recalled readily, especially in lingerie and premium swimwear. Yet when a question explicitly asks for yerli (Turkish) brands, the assistants answer almost entirely with domestic names; only 4 of 36 qualifying brands in that cut are foreign.
A second finding: no single brand owns the whole vertical. Leadership splits cleanly by subcategory: Penti leads innerwear, Dündar Çorap leads socks/hosiery, and Ayyıldız leads swimwear and beachwear. Below the leaders, each list thins out fast: of 189 brands we tracked, 28 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 45 questions, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking.
Two of the entries above, Trendyol and Hepsiburada, are marketplaces 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 per-subcategory winners.
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: Penti and Ayyıldız lead across models. But they differed sharply in breadth: Grok was the most generous, naming nearly 9.4 brands in a typical answer, while GPT-4o-mini and Claude were the most selective, closer to 3.5. 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 98.7%, were built by searching the live web, not from memory alone. For Turkish innerwear, hosiery and beachwear questions, the assistants reach for current web content almost every time. And when they do, they lean first on brands’ own websites: about 45% of all the sources they cited were official brand sites, with marketplaces (led by trendyol.com) close behind. 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 one thing: there is a lot of information available about that brand. It does not mean the brand’s products fit better, last longer, cost less, or are more comfortable. 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 main, local (yerli) and open leaderboards, the brand-only view, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the category-by-category winners across innerwear / socks / swimwear, 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.
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.
Written by
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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