App Store Keyword Research: A Step-by-Step Guide

App Store keyword research is the work of deciding which search terms go into the three text fields Apple matches against: the app name (30 characters), the subtitle (30 characters) and the keyword field (100 characters). As of October 2026 that still adds up to 160 characters per language, so every word has to earn its place.

This guide walks through the process in eight steps, with a full section on the one source of real demand data Apple provides: search popularity in Apple Ads, the service called Apple Search Ads until April 2025. Each rule is traced to Apple's or Google's documentation, and practitioner habits that Apple has never confirmed are labeled as such.

Where keywords count on the App Store

Apple's search documentation says results depend on text relevance and user behavior. Text relevance means matches against four things: the app's title, subtitle, keywords and primary category. User behavior covers downloads, ratings and reviews.

Two consequences follow. Every keyword change is tied to a release, so research has to be done before you submit, not after. And the category is part of the keyword budget: Apple indexes both the primary and the secondary category, which is one reason the choice matters. Our guide to App Store categories covers that decision.

Step 1: Build a seed list

Start with the words a person would type to find an app like yours. Apple's advice is to be specific about features and functionality, and its Apple Ads guidance adds use cases, including secondary ones.

Useful places to collect candidates:

• Your own feature list. Write each feature as the task it completes: "scan receipt", "split bill", "track mileage".
• App Store search suggestions. Type a root word into the store's search box and note the suggestions that appear.
• Reviews. Your reviews and competitors' reviews show the vocabulary users actually use, which is often plainer than marketing copy.
• Apple Ads suggestions. The keyword suggestion tool returns related terms for your app.

Aim for 100 to 200 candidates. Most will be cut in the next steps.

Step 2: Study competitors without using their names

Read the names and subtitles of the top apps for your main terms. They show which words the category considers standard, and which angles are already crowded.

Do not put competitor names in your own metadata. Apple's reference for the keyword field says names of other apps or companies are not allowed, and its list of improper keyword use includes competing app names and unauthorized trademarked terms. App Review Guideline 2.3.7 says the same about packing metadata with popular app names.

Paid search is different. In Apple Ads, Apple itself suggests bidding on the brand names of similar apps. That is a campaign decision and has no effect on what you may write in the organic keyword field.

Step 3: Check demand with Apple Ads search popularity

Apple does not publish search volumes. What it offers is search popularity, which Apple's Apple Ads glossary defines as a relative indicator of how popular a keyword is, based on App Store searches. Almost every ASO tool's "volume" or "popularity" column is built from this number.

What the number measures

Search popularity is relative, not a count. Apple's API reference for keyword suggestions describes it as a relative score, "not an absolute volume." It is also specific to a country or region, so a term's score in the US says nothing about the UK.

Apple documents more than one scale, which is a common source of confusion:

The "5 to 100" scale that many ASO tools show is a vendor convention. It does not appear in Apple's documentation.

Where to find it

You need an Apple Ads Advanced account. Apple Ads Basic has no keyword features and no API access. Inside Advanced, popularity shows up in three places: the keyword suggestion tool when you add keywords to an ad group, the Recommendations page, and the Impression Share reports in Insights, which show a search term's popularity alongside your share of impressions for it.

Apple also publishes ranked lists of the most searched terms by genre and country through its search term popularity data. That list only includes terms above an eligibility threshold, and is capped at 500 terms per country and genre, so it shows the head of demand and nothing of the long tail.

Why so many keywords now read 5

In autumn 2025 the data changed. The ASO tool vendor aso.dev measured the shift: between September 29 and October 7, 2025, the number of US keywords with a popularity above 5 fell from 165,875 to 39,254, a drop of about 77%. Most terms that previously scored between 20 and 60 began returning the minimum value. MobileAction reported the same pattern in a statement on October 17, 2025.

Apple has not commented on the change. Vendors that track it describe a cut-off at roughly 35: terms above it keep a real score, and most terms below it read 5.

How to use it today

• Treat a 5 as missing data. It no longer tells you a term has no searches, only that Apple is not reporting a score for it.
• Use real scores to rank your head terms. For terms that do return a score, the number still orders them reliably within one country.
• Do not convert scores into daily searches. Formulas that turn popularity into impressions are estimates built by vendors on a number Apple says is not a volume.
• For long-tail terms, test instead of guessing. A small discovery campaign, covered in step 8, shows which searches actually produce impressions and installs for your app.

Step 4: Judge relevance and difficulty

Cut every term your app does not honestly serve. Irrelevant terms are a named reason for rejection, and they do not convert even when they rank.

For the rest, Apple's own guidance describes the trade-off plainly. Popular, functional terms bring a lot of traffic but are highly competitive, especially for a newer or smaller app. Less common terms bring less traffic with less competition. A new app is usually better served by ranking in the top few results for specific terms than by sitting on page three for a broad one.

There is no official difficulty score. Every difficulty or "chance" number in an ASO tool is that vendor's own formula. A simple manual check works: search the term on the store and look at the top ten. If they are all household names with hundreds of thousands of ratings, treat the term as out of reach for now.

A workable scoring sheet has three columns per term: relevance (1 to 3, your judgment), demand (the Apple Ads score, or blank if it reads 5), and competition (your read of the top ten). Keep the terms that score high on relevance and at least reasonably on the other two.

Step 5: Place keywords in the name, subtitle and keyword field

Put your most important terms in the name and subtitle, where users also see them, and use the keyword field for everything else. Apple lists the fields it matches but publishes no weighting between them, so "the title counts most" is a practitioner convention, not a documented rule.

Apple's rules for the keyword field are specific:

• Separate terms with commas and no spaces. Spaces are allowed inside a phrase, as in "real estate".
• Do not repeat words that are already in the app name, subtitle or category.
• Skip plurals of words you have already included. Apple treats them as duplicates.
• Leave out generic words such as "app" or "game", and filler words such as "the" and "to".
• Avoid special characters unless they are part of your brand.
• Do not add your company name. The app is already searchable by app name and company name.

A before-and-after example for a bill-splitting app shows how much room these rules free up:

Two other fields are worth knowing about. Promotional text can be changed at any time but does not affect ranking, so it is the wrong place for keywords. And Apple tells developers not to add unnecessary keywords to the description in an attempt to improve search results.

Step 6: Use custom product pages and check your tags

Since October 29, 2025, keywords can be assigned to custom product pages. An app can have up to 70 of these pages, and a page with keywords assigned can appear in search results for those terms in place of the default product page.

The constraint is that the keywords must come from the keyword field of your latest approved version. Custom product pages do not add new terms. They let you show different screenshots and copy to people searching for different things. If your app serves two distinct intents, such as "meal planner" and "calorie counter", a page for each lets the listing match the search.

On the US App Store, also review your App Store Tags. Apple generates these labels from your metadata with language models, and they appear in search results and on the product page. You cannot add tags, only deselect wrong ones, under App Information in App Store Connect.

Step 7: Localize your keywords

Each localization has its own name, subtitle and keyword field. Apple's localization documentation says users can search for your app using localized keywords in every country or region where the App Store supports that language.

Apple publishes which languages each storefront supports. A few examples from its App Store localizations table:

Many ASO practitioners use the extra US locales, most often Spanish (Mexico), to hold additional English keywords. The table above is the documented basis for that practice. What Apple does not document is whether words from two locales combine into phrases or how they are weighted, so treat claims about that as vendor testing, not policy.

Two practical points. When you add a language, App Store Connect copies most properties from your primary language but not the description or keywords, so a new locale starts with an empty keyword field. And translate by intent, not word for word: Apple's advice is to tailor keywords to each market.

Step 8: Measure and iterate

Apple's organic reporting is coarse. App Store Connect Analytics lets you filter impressions, conversion rate and downloads by source, including App Store search, but it has no report by search term. Note that the search source also includes views and downloads from ads shown in search results.

Query-level evidence exists only on the paid side, in Apple Ads:

• Search Terms tab. Shows the searches that produced impressions, taps and installs for your ads. Terms under 10 impressions are hidden as low volume.
• Search Match. Matches your ad to searches automatically. Apple recommends running it in a campaign dedicated to keyword discovery.
• Impression Share reports. Show popularity and your share of impressions per search term and country.

A small discovery campaign with Search Match and broad match is the most direct way to learn which terms people use to find an app like yours, and which of them convert. Feed the winners into your next metadata update. If paid campaigns are new to you, our user acquisition primer explains where they fit.

Organic rank tracking, where a tool reports your position for each keyword, comes only from third parties; we compare the main options in our list of ASO tools. For a worked example of the full loop on a small app, see our ZenTones case study, where keyword work on niche, high-intent terms was followed by a 32% rise in organic installs.

How keyword research differs on Google Play

Google Play has no keyword field. A store listing has an app name of up to 30 characters, a short description of up to 80 and a full description of up to 4,000, and Google's guidance is to use search best practices in the description.

Repetition is the main risk on Google Play. Google's metadata policy warns that repetitive or irrelevant keywords in the name or description can lead to suspension, and its help pages give a string of near-identical car-racing terms as an example of what not to write. Google publishes no keyword density target, so figures such as "2 to 3 percent" are not from Google.

Keyword research is one part of a store listing. For the rest, including screenshots, ratings and conversion, see our App Store Optimization guide. If you would prefer to hand the work over, we also compare ASO services and agencies.

Keyword claims Apple's documentation does not support

FAQs

How many characters is the App Store keyword field?

100 characters per localization. Terms are separated by commas with no spaces, and the field is not visible to users.

Is Apple Search Ads the same as Apple Ads?

Yes. Apple renamed Apple Search Ads to Apple Ads on April 14, 2025. The keyword tools and search popularity data are part of Apple Ads Advanced.

What does a search popularity of 5 mean?

In the data most ASO tools show, 5 is the lowest value. Since autumn 2025 most long-tail keywords return it, so it is best read as "no score reported" and not as proof that nobody searches the term.

How often can I change my App Store keywords?

Whenever you submit a new version. The name, subtitle and keyword field are version properties, so each change goes through App Review with an update.

Should I put competitor names in my keyword field?

No. Apple's rules for the keyword field exclude the names of other apps and companies, and improper keyword use is a common reason for rejection.

Sources

• Apple Developer: Search, Creating your product page and Custom product pages
• App Store Connect Help: Platform version information, Localize app information and App Store localizations
• Apple Ads: glossary, keyword best practices and news (rename, April 14, 2025)
• Apple Developer News: custom product page keywords and the 70-page limit, October 29, 2025
• Google Play Console Help: Create and set up your app and Get discovered on Google Play search
• Vendor measurements of the 2025 popularity change: aso.dev (October 9, 2025) and MobileAction (October 17, 2025)

Limits and rules were checked against the pages above on October 5, 2026.