How to check App Store search popularity

Everyone doing ASO wants to know how many people search for a keyword. Apple doesn’t publish App Store search volume. It does, however, publish popularity scores and its most searched terms, and you can combine those with signals from search itself.

Apple’s own popularity scores (Apple Ads)

Apple Ads exposes search popularity for App Store terms. Through the Apple Ads API, Apple publishes its most searched terms for each storefront and genre every week, with a popularity score from 1 to 100, overall and within the genre, going back to October 2025.

• Accurate: it comes from Apple’s own search data.
• Limited to top terms: a few hundred terms per genre and storefront each week. Long-tail keywords won’t appear.
• Needs an Apple Ads account with an API user. Running campaigns should not be necessary, but check with your own account.

Watching how those terms move week to week shows seasonal demand and new trends early: a term climbing in your genre is a hint to add it before competitors do. asorocket’s top search terms shows climbers, fallers, new and dropped terms for each week.

Autocomplete signals

The App Store’s search suggestions are drawn from real searches. A term that appears after typing two or three letters is searched more than one that needs the full word. This works for any keyword, but it is a coarse signal.

Estimates from ASO tools

ASO tools, asorocket included, blend signals like these into a 0–100 popularity estimate for keywords Apple doesn’t list. Estimates are useful for comparing two keywords, and less useful as absolute numbers. A good tool tells you which number is Apple’s and which is its own; asorocket shows both side by side.

Using popularity well

• Never pick a keyword on popularity alone: weigh it against difficulty and relevance.
• Compare within a storefront. A 40 in Germany is not comparable to a 40 in the United States.
• Recheck seasonal terms: “tax”, “fitness” and “planner” move with the calendar.