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ChatGPT sends 94.5% of AI referrals in Turkey: what Turkish stores should do first

Turkey leads the world in the share of AI referrals that come from ChatGPT, yet OpenAI's product feed doesn't cover Turkey. For Turkish stores, the way into ChatGPT runs through crawlable, readable pages. Six steps, in order.

By 6 min read

When a Turkish shopper asks an AI assistant for a product and then clicks through to a store, the assistant is almost always ChatGPT. That makes one question more important for Turkish stores than for stores almost anywhere else: can ChatGPT find, read and link to your products?

In this article, we look at what the data says about ChatGPT in Turkey, why the route most US stores use to reach ChatGPT shoppers isn't open to Turkish stores yet, and the six steps that matter instead.

The numbers

According to the Digital 2026 report by We Are Social and Meltwater, 94.5% of AI-driven website referrals in Turkey come from ChatGPT. That is the highest share in the world; the global average is 80.9%. The same report found that 39.7% of Turkish internet users aged 16 and over used ChatGPT in the past month, against a global average of 26.5%.

The market behind those referrals is large. Turkey's Ministry of Trade put the country's 2025 e-commerce volume at ₺4.57 trillion, up 52% in nominal lira terms. There is no official measurement yet of how much of that starts in an AI assistant. But if a Turkish store gets AI referrals at all, they are most likely coming from one place.

The feed route isn't open in Turkey yet

In the US, a store can send ChatGPT a structured product feed. OpenAI's product feed specification says the standard upload currently targets the US, and that the shared format represents only the US, Canada and Mexico as destination countries. Turkey isn't on that list.

Shopify's Agentic Storefronts are another route: Shopify says products from its merchants become discoverable in ChatGPT by default. Whether that applies to a given store depends on Shopify's own rollout, which we haven't seen documented for Turkey.

So for most Turkish stores today, ChatGPT finds products the way a search engine does: by crawling and reading the website. That puts the weight on the pages themselves.

Six steps, in order

1. Let OAI-SearchBot in. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and that sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. Check your robots.txt for a rule that blocks it, directly or through a broad Disallow for all bots. OpenAI notes it can take about 24 hours for a robots.txt change to take effect.

What to do: Allow OAI-SearchBot on product, category and policy pages. You can still disallow GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler; the two settings are independent.

2. Don't block it at the firewall either. robots.txt is only half the story. A WAF or bot protection rule that challenges data-center traffic can stop the same crawler before it reads anything. OpenAI publishes the IP ranges for its bots and recommends allowing requests from them. We covered the trade-offs in bot protection at checkout.

3. Remember ChatGPT-User. When a person asks ChatGPT something, it may open your page with the ChatGPT-User agent. OpenAI says this agent doesn't crawl automatically, that robots.txt rules may not apply because the request is user-initiated, and that it isn't used to decide what appears in search. Blocking it at the firewall means a shopper who asked about your product gets an answer without your page.

4. Put price and stock in the first HTML. A crawler that reads the HTML your server sends can't see a price filled in later by JavaScript. Check one product page's source for the price shown on screen. We wrote a short test in how to make product pages machine-readable.

5. Make shipping and returns machine-readable. Turkish distance-selling rules make delivery time and the right of withdrawal part of the pre-contract information, so most Turkish stores already write them down. Give them numbers and structured data: see stock and delivery promises an agent can check and how shopping agents read your return policy.

6. Measure the clicks. OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links in its search results. Create a separate channel for it in your analytics so the traffic isn't lost inside "referral". Our crawl-to-refer calculator compares OpenAI's bot requests with the visitors ChatGPT sends you, from your own log.

Signs that ChatGPT can't reach you

You can see most of this in your own logs before any tool.

  • No OAI-SearchBot requests on product pages over a week or two, while other search crawlers visit. Something is blocking it, or your product pages are hard to reach from links.
  • ChatGPT-User requests answered with 403 or a challenge page. A shopper asked about your page and the assistant came back empty.
  • Visits with utm_source=chatgpt.com landing only on your homepage or blog. ChatGPT knows your site but not your products.

One more check is to ask ChatGPT about one of your products with search turned on and see whether your page is cited. Treat that as a hint, not a measurement: the same question rarely returns the same answer twice, as we explained in measuring the agent channel.

What not to spend time on yet

  • A US feed for a Turkish catalog. Prices in lira and delivery in Turkey don't fit a format that targets US shoppers.
  • llms.txt as a fix. It is cheap housekeeping, but there is no evidence it decides what ChatGPT recommends.
  • Checkout protocols. ACP and UCP matter once there is a channel to plug into. For Turkish stores, readable pages come first; we explained the order in layers before protocols.

The bottom line

Turkey is the most ChatGPT-concentrated AI referral market in the world, and the feed route that US stores use isn't available to Turkish catalogs yet. That makes the basics decisive: let OpenAI's search crawler in at robots.txt and at the firewall, put price and stock in the first HTML, give shipping and returns numbers, and measure what ChatGPT sends you.

Specoria checks whether OAI-SearchBot and user agents are allowed, whether your bot protection lets them through, and whether price, shipping and return details are readable on your pages, with checks written for Turkish distance-selling pages. Start with a free readiness test.

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