App Store keyword research tool, in practice
Most keyword tools for the App Store show a "search volume" that Apple never published. It is a model, trained on something, and it is wrong in ways you cannot see. Apple does publish one demand signal: the search-term popularity that Apple Search Ads shows advertisers, on a 0–100 scale. That is what aso.best reads, per phrase, and shows next to the phrase. The only thing we add is honesty about the floor: Apple reports 5 for anything below its threshold, so 5 means "no data", not "nobody searches this". For those phrases we show an estimate derived from the store's own autocomplete position, always labelled as an estimate.
Difficulty cannot come from Apple, so it comes from the store. We search the phrase in the storefront you chose and look at the ten apps on the first page. Rating count is the only strength signal Apple hands out per app, and it spans six orders of magnitude, so the score is built on a log scale: ten apps with a few hundred ratings each is an easy page, three apps with a million ratings each is not, however weak the other seven are. The top-three strength is shown separately because two weak apps on page one do not make a phrase easy.
A single phrase is rarely the answer. Each read returns the queries Apple volunteers beside it, with their own popularity, and the words the first-page listings share. Click any of them and it is read the same way. When you are looking for phrases a specific competitor ranks for, the competitor keyword miner reads its whole listing in one run and marks the phrases that live in its hidden keyword field.
Written by Primo, who builds aso.best. We ship iOS apps ourselves; every method on this page is one we use on our own listings, and the hidden-field inference is tested against our own keyword field. Not affiliated with Apple.