App Store Keyword Research: A Step-by-Step Method (2026)

Most App Store keyword advice stops at “find relevant keywords”. This guide is the actual method: where to get candidate terms, how to judge whether you can realistically rank for one, and how to pack Apple’s 100-character field so nothing is wasted.

Last updated 20 August 2026 · by the ASOWeb team

Where App Store keywords come from

There are four sources worth using, roughly in order of how much signal they carry.

1. Apple Search Ads search terms. If you have ever run a campaign, this is the only dataset that records what people actually typed and whether it led to an install. Everything else is modelled.
2. The apps already ranking beside you. If five competitors all rank for a term, that shelf exists and Apple is willing to show apps like yours on it.
3. Your own reviews and support inbox. The words customers use to describe your app are the words they would search for. They are almost never the words in your marketing copy.
4. Apple’s own autocomplete. Type a stem into App Store search and read the suggestions. They are ordered by popularity, which is a free ranking of demand.

Notice what is not on that list: keyword tools that invent volume estimates with no stated source. A number with no provenance is worse than no number, because it feels like evidence.

How to judge whether a keyword is winnable

A keyword is worth targeting when three things are true at once. Miss any one and you are spending characters on nothing.

• There is demand. Apple publishes a search popularity score from 5 to 100 through the Search Ads API. Below about 10, almost nobody searches it.
• You are relevant. Apple will not rank a note-taking app for “photo editor” however you write your metadata. Relevance is judged by your whole listing, your category, and who installs you.
• The shelf is reachable. Look at who currently holds the top ten. If they are all household names with hundreds of thousands of ratings, that shelf is not reachable this quarter. If two or three have under a thousand ratings, it is.

The practical shortcut: prefer specific three-word phrases over broad single words. “Photos” is unwinnable. “Shared photo album” is a real shelf with real intent and far fewer entrenched incumbents.

How Apple indexes your metadata

Apple builds your index from four fields, weighted roughly in this order:

The single most important consequence: your description does nothing for App Store search ranking. Write it for the human deciding whether to tap Get. This is the opposite of Google Play, where the full description is indexed.

The second consequence is that Apple combines words across fields into phrases. If your title contains “photo” and your keyword field contains “shared” and “album”, you can rank for “shared photo album” without ever writing that phrase. Repeating a word you already have in the title is therefore a wasted character.

Packing the 100-character keyword field

Six rules that between them typically recover 20 to 30 characters from a first draft:

1. Separate with commas and no spaces. “photo,album,shared” not “photo, album, shared”. A space after each comma in a ten-term list wastes ten characters.
2. Never repeat a word. Not across fields, and not in plural and singular form. Apple handles basic stemming.
3. Drop your own app name and your developer name. Both are already indexed.
4. Drop your category name. Apple indexes your category directly.
5. Drop stop words “the”, “for”, “and”, “with”, “app”. They are ignored, and “app” in particular is on almost every listing.
6. Use singular unless the plural is what people type. One form usually covers both.

Worked example. A first draft of photo, photos, album, albums, the best photo app, sharing, wedding is 63 characters and carries four wasted terms. Rewritten as album,shared,wedding,guest,qr,event,upload,memories it is 50 characters, covers more distinct phrases, and leaves half the field for expansion.

Measuring whether it worked

Change one thing at a time and give it a week. App Store rankings move daily and a single reading tells you nothing, you need a trend line either side of the change.

Record the date you shipped each metadata change against your ranking chart. Without that annotation you will be looking at a graph in three months with no idea which bump was yours and which was a competitor being removed. ASOWeb records this automatically as a change event, but a spreadsheet works too.

Expect it to take one to two weeks for a metadata change to fully take effect, because Apple re-indexes on its own schedule and your ranking then has to accumulate enough signal to move.

Five mistakes that waste characters

• Keyword stuffing the title. Apple rejects listings that read as keyword lists, and the title is what converts a browser into an installer.
• Targeting competitor brand names. Apple removes them, and you cannot outrank a brand for its own name anyway.
• Chasing one-word head terms. Enormous competition, vague intent, and the installs convert worse.
• Ignoring localisations. Each localisation has its own 100-character field. Adding en-GB alongside en-US doubles your indexed terms for that language.
• Changing everything at once. You learn nothing, and if rankings fall you cannot tell which edit caused it.

Frequently asked questions