1,116 answers, five assistants, one vertical: which sportswear brands does AI actually name in Turkey?

More and more shoppers are skipping the search bar and simply asking an AI assistant what to buy. So we asked five of them, 1,116 times, about sportswear and activewear in Turkey. Here’s what they named, why the answer changes completely depending on how you phrase the question, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”

Type “koşu için tayt önerisi” into ChatGPT and you’ll get a confident list in seconds. Ask Gemini which Turkish sportswear brands are worth buying, and you’ll get a different one. Ask Grok, and you’ll get nine names where GPT-4o-mini might give you 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 an assistant names three brands, those three are what the shopper sees; everything else effectively disappears.

Why this is worth paying attention to

Sportswear is one of the few apparel categories where demand is visibly growing in Turkey and the domestic industry is a net exporter. Official trade data tracks a “spor giyim” export line worth a few hundred million dollars a year, though it has been shrinking rather than growing — İHKİB records the category falling from $370 million in 2024 to $329 million in 2025, against a wider ready-made apparel sector that contracted 5.6% over the same period (İHKİB). Estimates of the domestic consumer market are less firm: private research firms put it somewhere between $1.4 billion and $2.0 billion in 2025, a spread that mostly reflects disagreement over whether footwear and accessories belong in the category. There is no official Turkish figure for retail sportswear sales, and no comparable basis on which to split it between domestic production and imports, so those numbers are context rather than measurement.

What is measurable is participation, and it is rising. The share of Turkish 15–65-year-olds describing themselves as active in sport rose from 26% in 2019 to 35% in 2024 according to the privately commissioned Türkiye Hareket Haritası survey, and organised running has become a genuine mass-participation occasion — the Turkish Athletics Federation recorded 41,416 registrations across the İstanbul Marathon’s distances in 2025. Retail has followed: Decathlon grew from 42 stores in 2023 to 52 by January 2026 with 28 more announced, Intersport more than doubled its network after changing hands in 2023, and Lululemon opened its first Turkish store in May 2025.

Discovery for all of it is going digital, and increasingly AI-mediated. Sports and outdoor was among the faster-growing Turkish e-commerce categories in 2025, reaching ₺40.8 billion, up 41.5% year over year, with e-commerce accounting for 35.7% of the category’s trade (Ministry of Trade / ETBİS). And the discovery layer itself is shifting: TÜİK reports 19.2% of individuals used generative AI in 2025, rising to 39.4% among 16–24-year-olds (TÜİK), while separate survey work suggests roughly four in ten Turkish internet users were reaching for ChatGPT in a typical month by mid-2025.

All of which makes one question pressing: as shoppers move to AI assistants, who do those assistants actually name when someone in Turkey asks what to wear to the gym, or which Turkish brand makes good leggings? So we set out to measure that shelf. Over a single run on 18–19 July 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, for 1,116 usable answers.

The shelf changes completely depending on how you ask

The clearest finding in this vertical is not who leads. It is that there are two different markets inside the same set of questions.

When we isolated the 23 origin-neutral questions — the only fair basis for comparing Turkish and foreign brands — mentions split 81.5% foreign to 18.5% Turkish. The top seven names are all international: Nike, Adidas, Decathlon, Under Armour, Lululemon, The North Face and Patagonia. The first Turkish brand is XSIDE, in eighth.

Then we isolated the 22 questions that explicitly ask for yerli (Turkish) brands, and the balance reversed almost exactly: 81.5% Turkish. Lescon leads, and the top seven are Turkish without exception.

Same assistants, same week, same scoring. The only thing that changed was one word in the question. The models plainly know these brands — more than half the 214 entities we tracked are Turkish — but they do not reach for them unless asked. That is a different problem from not being known, and a more fixable one.

Overall, across all 45 questions, Nike leads, appearing in 34.9% of answers, with Adidas and Lescon behind it. Of 214 brands and retailers we tracked, only 30 were named often enough to rank.

The main ranking

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.

A note on second place: Ayma Active, a small family-run label, ranks that high because the score rewards being named early as well as often — it appears in only 6.5% of answers, but is almost always the first name mentioned when it does. The full report shows the same table ranked by mention rate alone, where it leaves the top ten. Decathlon, Trendyol and Hepsiburada are a retailer and two marketplaces rather than brands; the report includes a brand-only view alongside the local and open leaderboards.

There is no single “sportswear” shelf

Sportswear is really several markets, and the assistants treat it that way. We split the questions into four activity segments, and got four different leaders:

• Running & outdoor is led by Decathlon, named in 40.7% of answers — the highest rate anywhere in the study — with its own house label Kiprun ranking separately in sixth.
• General & athleisure is the one segment Turkish brands own outright: XSIDE leads, and six of the top seven names are domestic, including DeFacto, Lescon, Kinetix and Exuma.
• Women’s & studio is the most internationally contested, led by Nike with Lululemon and Under Armour close behind.
• Men’s & team sports is also led by Nike, with Lescon the strongest domestic showing outside athleisure.

So a brand’s visibility is not one number. A label that is invisible in running can lead in everyday athleisure, and the useful question is which context a brand owns rather than where it sits overall.

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 top they largely did: Nike is the most-named brand in four of the five. But they differ sharply in breadth. Grok was the most generous, naming about 9.1 brands in a typical answer, while GPT-4o-mini (3.9) and Claude (4.4) were the most selective. The more brands an assistant lists, the more likely a smaller or newer label is to make the cut.

Grok was also the outlier in kind, not just in volume: it named Trendyol in 82.8% of its answers and Hepsiburada in 63.8%, putting both marketplaces ahead of any actual brand. It answers “where to buy” as much as “what to buy” — a habit none of the other four share.

Nearly every answer used a web search

Almost all of these answers, about 97.8%, were built by searching the live web rather than from memory alone. What the assistants read is unusually varied here. Brands’ own websites accounted for only 32.8% of the sources cited — far less than in other categories we’ve measured — with retailer sites at 21.2% and editorial content at 7.9%. The most-cited domain was trendyol.com, but the second was the editorial site onedio.com, and five of the top nine were retailers.

In other words, in this category AI does not learn about a brand mainly from the brand. It learns from the shops that stock it and the articles that list it.

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 just that a lot of information is available about that brand. It does not mean its leggings hold their shape, its running shoes last longer, or its prices are fairer. 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.

Frequently asked questions

Read the full report

This page is a summary. The complete report contains the full general, local (yerli) and open leaderboards, all four segment rankings, the brand-only view, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the winners by question type, 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.

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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. 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.