Reference
App Store search volume
Apple never publishes how many people search a term. It publishes something close — once you know how to read it.
Apple has never published how many people search for a keyword in the App Store. What it does publish is a popularity score, through Apple Search Ads — and almost every "search volume" you see in an ASO tool is either that score or a model built to stand in for it. Knowing which is the difference between reading a number and trusting a guess.
There is no search volume — there is popularity
When you look at keywords in Apple Search Ads, each one carries a search popularity figure. It is a relative score with a ceiling of 100, not a count of searches. Apple does not say how it is calculated, what a point is worth, or how it maps to searches per day.
That matters when a tool shows "12,400 searches a month" for an App Store keyword. The only first-party input it could have used is this relative score, so the searches figure is the tool's own model applied on top. It may be a reasonable model. It is still a model, and two tools will disagree about the same keyword for exactly that reason.
Where the scale stops
Apple does not publish a popularity figure for every term. In ASOTool's own measurements — a benchmark of about 2,500 US keywords read through Apple Search Ads — the lowest figure Apple publishes is 46. Below that, terms get no number at all.
So a keyword with no published popularity is not a keyword with zero searches. It is one below the line Apple reports, and any figure a tool shows for it is an estimate. That is most of the long tail — which is also where most small apps find the keywords they can actually win.
Reading the number
- Treat it as an ordering, not a quantity. A keyword at 70 is searched more than one at 60. How much more is not something the score tells you, so arithmetic on it — "twice as popular" — says more about the tool than about the searches.
- It is per storefront. The same phrase has a different popularity in the US and in Germany, and a keyword that is quiet in one market can be busy in another.
- It moves slowly. Day to day the figure is steady; a jump of a few points is a real change in demand, not noise worth chasing daily.
- High popularity is not the goal on its own. The busiest terms are held by apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings. Popularity says how big the room is, not whether there is space in it — that is what difficulty is for.
Google Play publishes nothing
Google offers no equivalent for Play. Google's Keyword Planner measures web search, not searches inside the Play Store, and the two behave differently: people open an app to use a brand rather than searching for it, and search the store for things they would never type into Google. Every Play popularity figure in every ASO tool is therefore an estimate.
How the gaps get filled
The honest estimate comes from the store itself. Autocomplete is the store's own ranking of what people type: a phrase the store suggests after two letters is in more demand than one it only offers once most of the phrase has been typed. Reading how early, and how consistently, a term is suggested gives a popularity estimate grounded in the store rather than in the web.
ASOTool shows Apple's published figure wherever there is one, and marks every estimate with a ~ so you always know which you are looking at. For Google Play, all figures carry the mark. Where the numbers come from covers the method behind each one.
What to do with it
- Use popularity to shortlist — enough demand to be worth a slot in your metadata.
- Check difficulty — who holds the top ten, and whether you can displace any of them.
- Sort by what is left: demand you could realistically reach. A quieter keyword with an open top ten is often worth more than a busy one you will never appear for.
- Check the storefront you actually care about, not only the US.
Keywords with the most room left
21 Questions - Card Games
Bubble Level for iPhone
Bedtime Routine: Sleep Habits
StressWatch: AI Stress Monitor
Photo Cleaner ®
Forest Sounds - Forest Music,Sound Therapy
Every one of them is on the keyword index.