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 small home appliances in Turkey. Here’s what they named, why the answer changes depending on how you phrase the question, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”
Type “which coffee machine should I buy?” into ChatGPT and you’ll get a confident shortlist in seconds. Add two words — yerli marka, Turkish brand — and you’ll get a different shortlist. That gap is the story of this report. In small home appliances, the assistants are holding two markets in their heads at once, and which one you see depends entirely on how you ask.
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
Small appliances are a genuine Turkish export industry. On the Ministry of Trade’s own sector grouping, drawing on TÜİK data, Türkiye exported roughly $1.27 billion of electrical small home appliances in 2025 against imports of about $437 million — a category that runs a substantial trade surplus, unlike most consumer-goods sectors. The domestic market is harder to pin down, because no official statistic measures it: the best available estimate, disclosed by Arzum in its annual report and attributed to independent retail research, put it at around TRY 118.9 billion in 2024, with a separate industry figure of TRY 115 billion for the same year. Treat both as private research rather than national statistics.
The manufacturing is regionally concentrated, though not in the single-town way furniture is. Kayseri is the clearest appliance cluster: the regional development agency ORAN counted 43 electrical-home-appliance firms employing 6,176 people in the province, and put Kayseri at roughly 6.8% of Türkiye’s electrical-home-appliance exports. Kahramanmaraş is the country’s metal-kitchenware centre, with a dedicated cluster organisation reporting 104 firms and 7,900 employees, and the DOĞAKA development agency crediting the province with about 21% of national metal-kitchenware production. Gaziantep holds the sector’s clearest official mark: “Gaziantep Bakır El İşlemeciliği” is a registered geographical indication with TÜRKPATENT, held by the city’s coppersmiths’ chamber. Konya, meanwhile, is one of Türkiye’s principal metal-casting centres — which is the context for a small Konya foundry brand that turns up unexpectedly high in our data.
What makes this category behave unlike any other we’ve measured is çeyiz. Marriage in Türkiye triggers a coordinated, multi-appliance purchase rather than a sequence of independent replacements: coffee and tea machines, kettles, blenders, toasters and vacuums bought together, as a set. TÜİK recorded 552,237 marriages in 2025, and the İstanbul Planlama Ajansı put the cost of an Istanbul çeyiz basket at TRY 170,099 in 2024, up 68.7% in a year. Alongside that sits genuine local category creation: Arçelik developed the automatic Turkish coffee machine, launching Telve in June 2004 after two years of research, and Arzum followed with OKKA in 2014. Ipsos’ household panel now puts Turkish coffee machine ownership at roughly six in ten Turkish households — a locally invented appliance that became a national fixture. Newer waves move fast too: airfryers reached 29% household penetration by 2024, and the vacuum market hit 7.75 million units in 2025, up 12.2%, on GfK’s retail panel.
And the way people buy is shifting toward AI. The Ministry of Trade’s 2025 e-commerce report puts white goods and small appliances at TRY 196 billion online, about 35.3% of the category’s total trade. Google Türkiye’s own research found 86% of online shoppers aware of AI tools, with around a fifth naming product and price research as where AI helps. Globally the signal is sharper: Salesforce’s 2026 commerce data found shopping journeys beginning with agentic search grew 200% year on year, while discovery through traditional search fell 15% between August 2025 and May 2026.
All of which makes one question pressing: in a category with a real domestic manufacturing base, a culturally specific purchase occasion and fast-moving product waves, who does AI actually name when a shopper asks for a recommendation? On 13 August 2026 we put the same 45 Turkish-language questions to five leading AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Perplexity — asking each question five times, of every model: 1,125 answers.
Three Turkish names led — until we changed the question
Across all 45 questions, three brands dominated. Karaca was named in 64% of all answers and topped the ranking at 92.95. Arzum (57.7%) and Arçelik (49.3%) followed within about seven points. Philips was fourth and the highest-placed foreign brand. Of the 76 entities we tracked, only 25 were named often enough to rank at all.
Then we split the questions. Twenty-two of them explicitly ask for Turkish or yerli brands; twenty-three carry no origin restriction at all. On the origin-neutral questions, the leaderboard reorders completely: Philips takes first place, named in 64.5% of those answers, ahead of Karaca, Arzum and Tefal. Foreign brands take 59.6% of mentions and 17 of the 27 qualifying places. The domestic dominance visible in the headline number is largely a product of the questions, not of the market.
There is a genuine convergence worth noting here. Philips’ own operating company, Versuni, claims roughly a quarter of the Turkish small-appliance market — which is broadly where our origin-neutral data places it too. But the two things are measuring different phenomena, and they diverge sharply elsewhere: Arzum, second in our overall ranking, held about 4.5% revenue share and sixth place in the actual market at the end of 2024, on GfK data cited in its own prospectus. Being the brand AI names most is not the same as being the brand people buy most.
The current ranking: the top entities by AI visibility
Below are the entities that cleared the 5% mention threshold across all 45 questions, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking, and it keeps the marketplaces (Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Akakçe) in the list because that’s the shelf shoppers actually meet. Tap a name to open its page.
For all 76 tracked entities, the three market cuts, the three product segments, the source analysis and the full methodology, see the current edition below.
Two of the “Turkish” brands were founded in Germany
Here is the wrinkle in the yerli question. When we asked specifically for Turkish brands, four foreign-founded names still cleared the bar — and two of them are Fakir and Grundig. Fakir was founded in Stuttgart in the early 1930s and bought by Türkiye’s Saruhan Holding; Grundig was founded in Germany in 1945 and acquired by Arçelik in 2007. Both are Turkish-owned today, which is presumably why the assistants offer them up as domestic brands.
Our report counts origin by where a brand was founded, not by who owns it now, so both are classified foreign. Under an ownership rule they would be Turkish, and the origin-neutral split would narrow from 40.4% to 44.4% Turkish. The direction of the finding holds either way — but it’s a good illustration of how much a single definitional choice can move a headline, which is why we state ours plainly in the full report.
Small appliances are three shelves, not one
The category doesn’t behave as a single market. We ranked the questions separately by product segment — kitchen appliances, coffee and tea, and a third group covering stick vacuums and çeyiz sets — and only 13 entities cleared the bar in all three. Seventeen qualified in exactly one. De’Longhi, Jura and Nespresso appear only in coffee and tea. Dyson, Dreame, Shark and Samsung appear only in the vacuum-led segment, where Dyson ranks third. Vitamix, Ninja and Cosori appear only in kitchen appliances. For most brands, AI visibility isn’t a category-wide property at all; it’s attached to one shelf.
The assistants agree on the core, not the depth
Karaca, Arzum and Arçelik appear in every model’s top five. Beyond that, the five diverge sharply. Grok names about 9.7 brands per answer; Claude names 3.7. Grok also puts the marketplace Hepsiburada in 96% of its answers, which is why marketplace positions in our data should be read as substantially one model’s habit rather than a market-wide pattern.
One model behaved differently again. Gemini used web search on only half its answers, where the other four searched every time — and what it names depends on which mode it’s in. When Gemini searches, 63.3% of its mentions go to Turkish brands; when it answers from memory alone, that falls to 52.3%, and an aspirational international shelf surfaces instead — De’Longhi, Sage, Breville, KitchenAid. The same assistant, the same question, two different answers.
Where AI learns about this category
Unusually, not from the brands themselves. Editorial and media sites supply 39.7% of the sources cited, roughly double the 19.0% coming from brands’ own websites. The single most-cited domain across the whole study is donanimhaber.com, a Turkish technology news site and forum, referenced by 47.4% of all answers — more than any manufacturer or marketplace. Reviews, comparison listicles, recipe sites and forum threads are where these systems are reading about kettles and coffee machines.
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 lot written about it by other people. It does not mean the brand’s products are better built, more durable, quieter or better value. Arzum sits second in our ranking and sixth in the market; the two measures are simply not the same thing. 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 three product segments, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the search-versus-memory comparison, the source analysis, all 45 questions 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
Karaca leads the overall ranking at 92.95, named in 64.1% of all 1,125 answers, with Arzum (90.24) and Arçelik (85.89) close behind. Philips is fourth and the highest-placed foreign brand, and Dyson is fifth.
Yes — more than most people expect. On questions that don't ask for Turkish brands, foreign names take 59.6% of mentions and 17 of the 27 qualifying places, and Philips leads outright. The picture only looks domestically dominated because half the questions specifically asked for Turkish brands.
On the core, yes: Karaca, Arzum and Arçelik appear in every model's top five. On depth, no. Grok names about 9.7 brands per answer while Claude names 3.7, and Grok is the only model to put marketplaces at the top of its list.
For one model it clearly does. Gemini searched on only half its answers, and when it did, 63.3% of its mentions went to Turkish brands, against 52.3% when it answered from memory. The other four models searched every time.
Mostly from Turkish editorial and forum content rather than from manufacturers. Editorial and media domains supply 39.7% of cited sources against 19.0% for brands' own sites, and the most-cited domain of all is the technology forum donanimhaber.com, referenced by 47.4% of answers.
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.
ChatGPT 5.6 Luna Pro, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5, Perplexity Sonar and Grok 4.3 were each asked the same 45 Turkish-language questions five times on 13 August 2026, producing 1,125 answers with none empty and none excluded.
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.
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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