750 questions, five assistants, two markets: which Turkish travel brands does AI actually name?

More and more travellers are skipping the search bar and simply asking an AI assistant where to book. So we asked five of them, 750 times, about tours and car rental in Turkey. Here’s what they named, how the two markets differed, and why “most recommended” is not the same as “best.”

Type “recommend me a reliable Turkish tour operator” into ChatGPT, and you’ll get a confident answer in seconds. Ask Gemini to find you a car-rental firm, and you’ll get another confident list. Ask Grok, and you’ll get nearly ten names where Claude might give you four. Discovery is moving from the search engine, where you scroll 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 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

Turkey’s travel market is large on both the resident and inbound sides. Domestic tourism spending reached TL 555 billion in 2025, up 32.4% year on year, across nearly 67.9 million domestic trips (TÜİK, as reported by Hürriyet Daily News). On the inbound side, the country earned $65.2 billion in tourism income from 63.9 million visitors, up 6.8% and 2.7% respectively (TÜİK, via Anadolu Agency).

Discovery is increasingly digital. IMARC put Turkey’s online travel market at $5.46 billion in 2025, projecting roughly 9% annual growth through 2034 and tying it to mobile-first booking and AI-supported trip planning (IMARC Group, 2026); internet use among 16–74-year-olds reached 90.9% in 2025 (TÜİK). The shift toward AI at the research stage is visible globally: Adobe reported generative-AI-driven traffic to U.S. travel sites up 3,500% year on year in July 2025, with 29% of surveyed consumers using AI to plan trips (Adobe Analytics) — a signal that assistants are becoming discovery and comparison interfaces, not just booking engines.

Car rental, the second market in this study, is measured more by fleets than booking revenue: in Q4 2025 daily car rental ran 138,300 vehicles across 1.09 million contracts, and the rental sector as a whole purchased TL 278.1 billion of vehicles in 2025 (TOKKDER; Anadolu Agency). The operator base mixes international chains (Avis/Budget, Enterprise, Europcar, Sixt) with domestic firms (AVEC, Garenta, QCar, Rent Go, Zeplin, Ziraat Filo), and comparison platforms such as Enuygun and Yolcu360 list 100+ rental firms, a digital-discovery layer that maps directly onto what the assistants surface.

All of which makes one question pressing: as travellers move to AI assistants, who do those assistants actually name when someone asks for a tour operator or a rental car? So we set out to measure that shelf. Over a single day in June 2026, we put the same 30 Turkish-language questions to five leading AI assistants; GPT-4o-mini, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok, asking each question five times: 750 answers across two markets, tour agencies and car rental.

The two markets don’t look alike

The clearest finding is that Turkey’s travel sector is really two different markets on the AI shelf. In tour agencies, the answers were overwhelmingly Turkish: Jolly Tur appeared in 70% of tour answers across all five assistants, leading a top five — Jolly Tur, Setur, ETS Tur, Prontotour, MNG Turizm, that is entirely Turkish. In car rental, the picture flips: the leaders are international chains; Avis, then Sixt, with Garenta the most visible Turkish brand at third.

Below the leaders, each list thinned out fast. Of 177 brands we tracked, 52 were named often enough to rank at all (21 tour agencies, 31 car-rental firms). Visibility is concentrated: a small group occupies most of the space, and a long tail barely registers.

Tour agencies : the current ranking

Below are the Turkish tour agencies that cleared the 5% mention threshold, ranked by AI Visibility Score. This is a visibility ranking, not a quality ranking.

Car rental : the current ranking

For all 178 tracked brands, the methodology and the category breakdowns, see the current edition on the right side.

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, Jolly Tur and Avis lead across models. But they differed sharply in breadth: Grok was the most generous, naming nearly ten brands in a typical answer, while GPT-4o-mini and Claude were the most selective, naming closer to four. The more brands an assistant lists, the more likely a smaller, newer operator is to make the cut.

Nearly every answer used a web search

Almost all of these answers (about 98%) were built by searching the live web, not from memory alone. For Turkish travel questions, the assistants reach for current web content almost every time. And when they do, they lean heavily on brands’ own websites: nearly half of all the sources they cited were official brand sites. 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 tours are better, its cars newer, its prices lower, or its service more reliable. AI visibility measures how easily a brand is found, not how good it is. Travellers 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 both leaderboards in full, the breakdown for each AI assistant, the category-by-category winners, 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.