1,098 answers, five assistants, three aisles: which mother and baby brands does AI actually name in Turkey?

More and more parents are skipping the search bar and simply asking an AI assistant what to buy. So we asked five of them, 1,098 times, about baby products in Turkey. Here’s what they named, where they disagreed, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “safest.”

Type “hangi bebek arabası markası iyi?” into ChatGPT and you’ll get a confident answer in seconds. Ask Gemini, Claude, Grok or Perplexity the same thing and you’ll get a different list — and if you switch from strollers to bodysuits to bottles, the list changes again. Baby products turn out to be a category where the assistants agree on remarkably little, and that disagreement is the story.

This is the quiet shift 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 have been placed on a shelf at eye level, and everything else is in the stockroom.

Why this is worth paying attention to

Start with the demographics, because they frame everything else. Turkey had 895,374 live births in 2025 and a total fertility rate of 1.42 children per woman, according to TÜİK, the national statistics institute. Nine years earlier, in 2016, there were 1,309,771 births at a rate of 2.10. That is a fall of more than 400,000 births a year, and TÜİK notes fertility has now sat below the 2.10 replacement level for nine consecutive years. In 2025, 76 of Turkey’s 81 provinces were below replacement. Parents are also starting later: the mean age at first birth rose to 27.5 years, up from 26.4 in 2019.

Fewer babies, in other words, and a category competing harder for each one. That competition plays out across an industry with two very different halves.

Clothing is where Turkey manufactures. Baby-apparel exports were US$216.7 million in 2025, down 13.2% on the year, per the İstanbul garment exporters’ association İHKİB, using Ministry of Trade data. İHKİB puts Turkey tenth in the world for baby-apparel exports in 2024, on US$250 million and a 2.6% global share. Most of that comes from one place: Bursa’s chamber of commerce and industry, BTSO, stated in August 2024 that the city accounts for more than half of national baby and children’s clothing production, and the sector association BEKSİAD has put the Vişne trade district at roughly 4,000 producers and 100,000 employees. Turkey is also a serious organic-textile base — GOTS certified 1,730 Turkish brands and facilities in 2024, the third-largest total worldwide.

Durables are where Turkey imports. Strollers tell the story plainly: Turkey imported US$30.8 million under the baby-carriage tariff code in 2024 against US$1.9 million of exports, with China supplying roughly 97% of the import value, on UN Comtrade data published through the World Bank. A Ministry of Trade investigation counted 224,886 complete strollers imported in 2020, 98.5% of them Chinese. A domestic manufacturing base does exist — the Ministry named six Turkish stroller producers, and car-seat maker Vatan Çocuk Gereçleri says its Casual brand reached 75% local content and exports to 15 countries — but the shelf is import-led.

It is also a regulated shelf, which makes the stakes different from most retail categories. Turkey’s traffic regulation has required a child restraint for any child under 150 cm and 36 kg since June 2010, and Turkey has applied the UN’s R129 “i-Size” standard since 9 July 2013. Getting a recommendation wrong here is not a matter of taste.

Meanwhile the buying is moving online fast. Turkey’s total e-commerce volume reached TL 4.567 trillion in 2025, up 52.2% year on year, on the Ministry of Trade’s ETBİS figures. The specialist retailer ebebek alone reported TL 27.7 billion of revenue for 2025 and 40.6 million website visits in the first quarter of 2026.

And AI is entering that journey. We could not find a published Turkish survey measuring how many local shoppers use AI assistants to research a purchase — a genuine gap. Globally, Capgemini’s What Matters to Today’s Consumer 2025, fielded across 12,000 consumers in twelve countries in late 2024, found 58% had begun replacing search engines with generative AI for product recommendations. Turkey was not among the countries surveyed, so treat that as directional rather than local.

All of which makes one question pressing: in a shrinking, safety-regulated, increasingly online category, who does AI actually name when a parent asks? On 26 July 2026 we put the same 44 Turkish-language questions to five leading assistants — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity — asking each question five times: 1,098 usable answers.

One brand kept coming up

The clearest pattern was a single dominant name. Chicco appeared in 30.7% of all 1,098 answers — around 1.6 times the rate of the next entity — and was the most-mentioned brand for four of the five assistants, third for the fifth. No other brand came close on raw volume.

But volume isn’t the whole score. Our AI Visibility Score also counts how early a brand is named and how many assistants know it, and on prominence Chicco is middling: it tends to appear partway down a list. Philips Avent was named in less than half as many answers yet is named earliest of anything in the study, which is what lifts it to second. The Nest Kids, a Turkish baby-clothing specialist, is third.

Below that, the table is unusually flat. Of the 233 entities we tracked, 30 were named often enough to rank at all, and they cluster rather than separate. This is not a market with a clear big three.

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 or safety ranking, and it deliberately keeps the marketplaces (Trendyol, Hepsiburada) and the retailer ebebek in the list, because that’s the shelf shoppers actually meet.

For all 226 tracked brands and retailers, the nine market cuts, the source analysis and the full methodology, see the current edition below.

Nobody wins the whole market

Here’s the finding that surprised us most. “Mother and baby” is a retail aisle, not a market — and the assistants treat it as three separate problems.

Ask about clothing and the leader is The Nest Kids, with TinyLamb and Little Gusto close behind: all Turkish specialists, and 20 of the 28 brands that rank in this aisle are domestic. Ask about travel gear — strollers, car seats, carriers — and Chicco leads a field where 17 of 29 are foreign. Ask about feeding and Philips Avent leads on bottles and pumps.

Sixty-nine brands rank somewhere across those three aisles. Sixty-one of them rank in only one. Neither The Nest Kids nor Philips Avent qualifies in any aisle but its own. A brand’s overall position, in this category, says much less than it looks like it does.

The assistants disagree — and one of them is a different market entirely

You might expect five AI systems to converge. On the leading name they broadly did. On everything else they did not.

The spread in how much they say is wide: Grok named about nine and a half brands per answer, GPT-4o-mini four. They also disagree on origin — Claude and ChatGPT’s mini model returned mostly foreign names in their top ten, Grok mostly Turkish.

The sharpest split was about what kind of thing to recommend. Grok’s three most-named entities were not brands at all — they were Trendyol (85% of its answers), Hepsiburada (75%) and the baby retailer ebebek (43%). Chicco, the brand leading the whole study, was only its fourth. Neither Trendyol nor Hepsiburada appeared in any other assistant’s top ten. Four of five assistants answer a baby-product question with brands; one answers substantially with the shops that sell them. Which assistant a parent happens to open changes not just the brands they see but the kind of answer they get.

Turkish or foreign? It depends how you ask

Twenty-one of our 44 questions asked specifically for yerli — Turkish — brands, and 23 left origin open. The two produce different shelves.

On the open questions, foreign brands took 54.5% of mentions to Turkish brands’ 45.5%, and 21 of the 37 ranking entities were foreign. Add the yerli filter and the picture inverts: 15 of 19 ranking entities are Turkish, led by Kraft. The assistants clearly understand the constraint.

The split follows the industry split almost exactly. Where the product is safety-regulated and capital-intensive — car seats, strollers, bottles — the assistants reach for international names. Where it’s apparel, they reach for Turkish ones. Turkey’s strength in this aisle, as AI describes it, is textile.

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 product is good, and it certainly does not mean it is safe. 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 product is better made, better value, or compliant with any standard.

That distinction matters especially here, because this aisle contains car seats and feeding equipment. Safety here is governed by certification and regulation — the R129 approval mark, the market-surveillance system — not by how often a chatbot mentions a name. AI visibility measures how easily a brand is found, not how good or how safe it is.

Read the full report

This article is a summary. The complete report contains the leaderboards for all nine cuts (overall, yerli-only, origin-neutral, three product segments and three question types), the breakdown for each AI assistant, the source analysis showing where these systems actually read about baby brands, a chapter on what happens when a Turkish question is genuinely ambiguous, 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.

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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 of its quality or safety. 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.