Start from your listing, see which words the top apps for a search share, judge difficulty from how established they are, and add the winners to your keyword field without breaking Apple’s format rules.
The workspace suggests up to six starting keywords from your name, subtitle, and keyword field, plus your live description and category once the listing is linked. Or type your own.
AppGrowthKit pulls the top 25 apps for the search in your storefront and surfaces the words they share. Score any of them for difficulty from the median rating count of the top 10 apps for that keyword.
Add a keyword to the field in one click. Track it, and each check you run records where your linked app ranks in the top 25, with a history of up to 30 checks.
Low under 500 median ratings, medium under 5,000, high under 50,000, very high at 50,000 or more. No black-box score: benchmark any keyword to see the top 10 apps and rating counts behind its label.
The 100-character field is checked for spaces next to commas, semicolons, quotes, hashtags, repeated words, and words Apple already indexes from your name and subtitle.
Tracked keywords keep a rank history per storefront, so you can see whether a metadata change moved your linked app inside the top 25.
Apple lists the app name, subtitle, keyword field, and category as the text it matches against a search. Promotional text does not affect ranking, and the description is not on that list. Apple also advises against repeating words from the name, subtitle, or category in the keyword field.
| Field | Limit | App Store search |
|---|---|---|
| App name | 30 characters | Indexed |
| Subtitle | 30 characters | Indexed |
| Keyword field | 100 bytes, comma-separated | Indexed, never shown on the listing |
| Category | Primary, optional secondary | Indexed |
| Promotional text | 170 characters | Does not affect ranking |
| Description | 4,000 characters | Not in Apple’s list of search text |
Apple: App Store searchASO tool and listing auditHow to write the keyword fieldLong-tail App Store keywords
It runs the keyword through Apple’s public iTunes Search API in your storefront, takes the top 10 results, and uses their median number of ratings. Under 500 is low, under 5,000 medium, under 50,000 high, and 50,000 or more very high.
No. Apple does not publish raw search volume (Apple Ads shows only a relative 1 to 5 popularity score), and volumes in other tools are modelled estimates. AppGrowthKit sticks to what the App Store returns: who ranks, how established they are, and where you rank.
One hundred, comma-separated, with no spaces after the commas. App Store Connect counts bytes, so accented and non-Latin characters use more of the limit. Apple also indexes words from your app name (30) and subtitle (30), so repeating them in the keyword field wastes space.
The country picker lists 30 major storefronts, and linking a listing with an App Store URL from any other country uses that storefront. The country is set per project, tracked keywords keep their rank history per storefront, and your latest research run is saved with its storefront.
Link your App Store listing to a project and research your first keywords.