More and more shoppers are skipping the search bar and simply asking an AI assistant what to buy. So we asked five of them, 1,125 times, about shoes and bags in Türkiye. Here’s what they named, what changed when we added one word to the question, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”
Type “en iyi ayakkabı markaları” into ChatGPT and you get a confident list in seconds. Type “iyi bir yerli ayakkabı markası var mı” and you get a confident list too — but almost none of the same names. That gap, between the answer you get when you ask for Turkish brands and the answer you get when you don’t, turned out to be the biggest single finding in this study.
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 six brands, those six 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
Türkiye makes a great deal of what goes on people’s feet. The country produced 455 million pairs of footwear in 2024, ranking eighth in the world by volume and sixth among exporters by pairs shipped, according to the APICCAPS World Footwear Yearbook 2025. In value terms it is a smaller player: the Ministry of Trade’s 2026 sector report puts 2025 footwear exports at $1.009 billion against imports of $1.679 billion, of which $543 million — 32.3% — came from China. Türkiye’s largest export markets are Iraq, Romania and Germany.
Leather goods are the more specialised half of the story. Bags, cases and wallets — HS heading 4202 — accounted for $192.0 million of exports in 2025, essentially flat on the year, per İDMİB, within a broader leather-goods category of $490.5 million. As of February 2025 the Ministry recorded 6,960 firms and 55,957 employees across leather and leather products, concentrated in tanning and processing clusters at Tuzla, İzmir-Menemen, Uşak and Bolu-Gerede, with Gedikpaşa, Mercan and Laleli in İstanbul identified as the main saraciye — bags and accessories — production and wholesale districts. Regional bodies make bigger claims for their own areas: Gerede’s chamber of commerce has put the district at 40–50% of Türkiye’s shoe-leather production, a local figure we’d treat as a claim rather than a verified national statistic.
The way people buy has moved decisively online. “Clothing, footwear and accessories” was the single largest e-commerce category in Türkiye in 2025 at ₺428.70 billion, up 42.3% year on year and representing 25.4% of all trade in the category, according to the Ministry of Trade’s e-commerce report published in May 2026. TÜİK found that 76.7% of Turkish online shoppers had bought clothing, footwear or accessories — the most-purchased category online. Trendyol is the dominant marketplace; the Competition Authority concluded in 2025 that it holds a dominant position in multi-category e-marketplaces, with Hepsiburada its strongest rival.
And AI is now part of that journey. Google Türkiye’s Smart Shopper 2024 found 13% of Turkish shoppers had used chat-based AI tools while looking for inspiration on what to buy, and 23% had used a brand or retailer chatbot. TÜİK put generative-AI use at 19.2% of internet users aged 16–74 in 2025, while GWI’s Digital 2026 data recorded 39.7% of Turkish internet users opening ChatGPT in a given month — well above the 26.5% worldwide figure. Globally, Capgemini found 58% of consumers had replaced search engines with generative AI as their go-to for product recommendations, up from 25% a year earlier.
All of which makes one question pressing: as a large, cluster-driven, increasingly online footwear and leather 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 21 August 2026 we put the same 45 Turkish-language questions to five leading AI assistants — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity — asking each question five times, of every model: 1,125 answers.
One word changed almost every answer
Twenty-two of our questions asked explicitly for yerli brands. Twenty-three didn’t mention origin at all. The two sets produced almost entirely different shelves.
On the Turkish-only questions, 31 of the 32 brands that cleared our threshold were Turkish, and they took 93.9% of all mentions. Forelli led, followed by Desa, Manu Atelier and Greyder. Skechers, Nike, Adidas, New Balance and Asics — five of the biggest names in global footwear — did not appear in that table at all.
Drop the word yerli, and it inverts. On origin-neutral questions, foreign brands took 70.2% of mentions and 46 of the 70 qualifying places, and the entire top six was foreign: Skechers, New Balance, Nike, Samsonite, Adidas, Asics. The highest-placed Turkish brand was Derimod, seventh.
That 64-point swing is the widest origin gap we have recorded in this series, and it matters more than it might first appear — because most people don’t add the word. Academic survey work published in 2025 found Turkish consumers split 27.5% local, 23.5% global and 49.0% “doesn’t matter” on ready-to-wear origin. If roughly half of shoppers are indifferent to where a brand comes from, then the question most of them actually type looks like our open cut, not our local one.
The finding also isn’t an artefact of how AI behaves. Asked in October 2024 which brands come to mind for quality footwear and bags, Turkish consumers named Adidas (45.7%), Nike (37.2%) and Puma (16.8%) before any domestic brand; Derimod was the highest Turkish name at 10.2%, in an Aksoy Araştırma study for Marketing Türkiye. The assistants are reproducing a pattern that already exists.
Shoes and bags are two different markets
We split the questions into footwear and bags expecting two halves of one category. We got two separate ones. Only seven brands cleared the threshold in both segments — and two of those are marketplaces.
Skechers led footwear, ahead of Forelli, Kinetix and Greyder. Manu Atelier led bags, ahead of Desa and Derimod, with Samsonite and Tergan behind them. Bags is the more domestic of the two on volume and the more crowded overall, and it contains three distinct competitive sets sharing one shelf: Turkish leather houses, functional luggage brands, and international luxury.
Here too, consumer research points the same way. A 2023 Xsights study for Marketing Türkiye found FLO was the first brand to come to mind for shoe shopping at 31%, and led boots and outdoor shoes at 37% — but for sneakers and sports shoes, Adidas took 49% and Nike 46%. Which brand owns your mind depends entirely on which shoe you’re picturing, and the assistants behave the same way.
The current ranking: the top brands by AI visibility
Below are the highest-scoring brands from the general cut, across all 45 questions. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking, and it deliberately keeps retailers and marketplaces in the list, because that’s the shelf shoppers actually meet. Tap a name to open its page.
Skechers tops it, but not because it is named most often — that’s Derimod, in 22.76% of all 1,125 answers. Skechers wins because it is named earlier in the answers where it appears. Of the 424 brands we tracked, 50 were named often enough to rank at all in this cut, and 313 didn’t qualify anywhere.
For the full 50-brand leaderboard, both product segments, the model-by-model breakdown, the source analysis and the full methodology, see the current edition below.
The assistants agree less than you’d expect
Five AI systems, the same 45 questions — and no single brand was the most-named in more than two of them. Derimod topped Gemini and Perplexity, Desa topped ChatGPT, Forelli topped Claude. That’s a looser consensus than we’ve found in any other category in this series, and it fits a market this fragmented.
They also differ enormously in how much they say. Grok named roughly 14 brands per answer; Claude named about six. So for a brand outside the leading names, being mentioned at all depends heavily on which assistant happens to be answering. Grok is also the outlier in what it names: it answered with Trendyol in 73.8% of its responses and Hepsiburada in 51.6%, ahead of every actual brand — pointing at where to buy rather than what to buy.
Searching the web made the answers more Turkish
One model, Gemini, used web search on only a third of its answers — which let us run a comparison the other four made impossible. On the 20 questions it answered both ways, the pattern was strikingly directional: 16 of the 20 biggest gains from searching went to Turkish brands, including Mehry Mu, Manu Atelier, Misela and Mlouye. Two brands, Semender Leather and Rossea, were never named at all unless the model searched. In the other direction, 14 of the 20 biggest gains from answering off memory went to foreign brands, led by New Balance and Adidas.
The reading is straightforward. A model’s stored knowledge leans toward globally-marketed names; the live Turkish web is where the domestic specialists live. For a smaller Turkish brand, being findable online isn’t a supplement to being known — in this data it’s the whole mechanism.
That’s visible in the sources too. Brand-owned websites were the single largest category of what these assistants read, and the second most-cited domain in the entire study was forelli.com.tr, a single brand’s own site, appearing in 18.6% of all answers.
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 shoes are more comfortable, the leather better, or the price fairer. 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 eight cuts, the footwear and bags segment rankings, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the question-type 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 side.
Frequently asked questions
Skechers leads the general cut at 83.96, followed by Forelli (81.22) and Derimod (81.03), which is actually the most-mentioned brand overall at 22.76% of answers. The two product segments have different leaders: Skechers in footwear, and Manu Atelier in bags ahead of Desa and Derimod.
It depends almost entirely on whether the question asks for them. On questions requesting yerli brands, 31 of 32 qualifying brands are Turkish and they take 93.9% of mentions. On origin-neutral questions, Turkish brands take 29.8% of mentions and none of the top six places. The assistants clearly know which Turkish brands exist — they mostly wait to be asked.
Less than in other categories we've studied. No brand is the most-named in more than two of the five models: Derimod tops Gemini and Perplexity, Desa tops ChatGPT and Forelli tops Claude, while Grok answers with Trendyol in 73.8% of its responses. They also differ in breadth, with Grok naming around 14 brands per answer against Claude's six.
In this study, yes, and in a clear direction. Gemini searched on only a third of its answers, and on the 20 questions it answered both ways, 16 of the 20 largest gains from searching went to Turkish brands — with two, Semender Leather and Rossea, never named without it — while 14 of the 20 largest gains from answering off memory went to foreign brands.
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, comfort, durability, leather grade, price or reliability. Visibility is about how easily a brand is found, not how good it is.
Claude Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT 5.6 Luna Pro, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Perplexity Sonar and Grok 4.3 were each asked the same 45 Turkish-language questions five times on 21 August 2026, producing 1,125 answers. No question was rewritten, and no brand sponsored or influenced the study.
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.
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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