What an “observed position” is
When you run a check, our server sends your keyword to a store search source for each selected country and reads the ordered list of apps that comes back. The position we show is your app’s place in that list at that moment. We call it an observed position rather than a “rank” because neither Apple nor Google publishes an official keyword ranking, and the results a person sees on their own device can differ.
- We never estimate, interpolate or invent a position. If the app is not in the list, the position is empty.
- Every result states its source, how many results were checked and when it was retrieved.
- A result served from our cache is labelled as cached and keeps its original retrieval time.
App Store sources
| Source | Status | Depth | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| App Store storefront search (primary) | Unofficial | About 200–250 | The search endpoint Apple’s own store clients use, queried with the storefront of the selected country. In our comparisons its ordering matched the App Store web search for the same storefront. It is not a documented public API and may change or throttle requests. Requests use an English-language client, so app names can appear in English. |
| iTunes Search API (fallback) | Official, documented | Up to 200 | Apple’s public search API. Reliable and country-aware, but its relevance ordering is not identical to the App Store app, so positions from it are labelled “iTunes Search API”. |
App metadata (name, developer, icon, rating, rating count, description, screenshots) comes from Apple’s official iTunes Lookup API. App Store results are for iPhone search; iPad-only ordering is not covered. App Store search ads are not part of these results.
Google Play sources
| Source | Status | Depth | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Play web search (primary) | Unofficial | First page only, typically 30 (at most about 50) | The public play.google.com search page, requested for the selected country and that country’s main language. Google offers no public keyword-search API; the official Google Play Developer API only manages a developer’s own apps. |
| SerpApi Google Play (optional) | Third-party, paid | About 30 | A commercial provider that runs the query through its own infrastructure. It is only used when the site operator has configured an API key; the live status below shows whether it is enabled. |
Country accuracy on Google Play. The country parameter selects the country catalogue, and we observed clearly different result lists per country. However, Google can also take the requesting server’s network location into account, so a Google Play position should be read as “the public web result for this country setting” rather than a verified in-country device ranking. Google Play is not offered in mainland China, so that country is marked unsupported for Android.
Category chart positions
If you run a check without a keyword, the tool reports where the app sits in the store’s top charts instead: its own category’s chart and the overall chart, for the Free, Paid or Grossing list. This is a different measurement from a keyword position; charts are driven mostly by recent installs or revenue.
- App Store: Apple’s public iTunes RSS chart feeds, per country and genre. They list the top 100 apps of each chart, so anything below that is reported as “not in the top 100”.
- Google Play: the chart request the Google Play website itself makes (unofficial), up to 200 apps per chart and country.
- The category is the app’s primary category as listed in the store. Charts are cached for up to three hours.
Live status of each source
Coverage
154 country storefronts are available for the App Store and 154 for Google Play. Each country was verified with a live request before being enabled; where the storefront search could not be verified for a country, the iTunes Search API is used there. You can check up to five countries per request.
Limits you should know about
- Personalization. Stores may adjust results by device, language, account history and ongoing experiments. Our requests are signed-out and neutral.
- Depth. “Not found in the first N results” means exactly that. It is not evidence that an app has no visibility.
- Timing. Results change during the day. Two checks an hour apart can legitimately differ.
- Caching. To protect the stores and keep the service free, identical searches are cached for up to one hour. The retrieval time on each result tells you how fresh it is.
- No volume, download or revenue data. The stores do not publish these, so we do not show them.
Estimated keyword difficulty
The Keyword Explorer shows a 0–100 estimate of how hard it looks to rank for a keyword. It is our own heuristic, computed only from the first ten results returned, and is not an Apple or Google metric.
| Signal | Weight | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Incumbent strength | 40% | Median rating count of the leading apps on a logarithmic scale (1,000,000 ratings = maximum). When rating counts are not on the search cards (Google Play) the public install bracket is used instead (100,000,000+ = maximum). |
| Title keyword saturation | 30% | Share of the leading apps whose title contains every word of the keyword. |
| Exact-match competition | 15% | Share of the leading apps whose title contains the exact phrase. |
| Rating quality | 15% | Average rating of the leading apps, scaled from 3.0 (none) to 5.0 (maximum). |
Signals that are unavailable are left out and the remaining weights are rescaled. If too little data is available, no score is shown. Below 35 is labelled low, 35–64 medium, 65 and above high.
ASO score
The ASO Checker scores a listing from 0 to 100 as a weighted average of checklist items. It is an internal analytical estimate, not something Apple or Google provides or endorses. Items without reliable public data are excluded from the average rather than counted as zero, and the audit states how much of the checklist could be scored.
| Item | Weight | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| App name | 15 | Use of the 30-character limit (both stores). |
| Subtitle / short description | 12 | Use of 30 characters (App Store) or 80 characters (Google Play). |
| Keyword field | 10 | App Store only, and only if you paste it: use of the 100-byte allowance, wasted spaces, words duplicated from the name or subtitle. |
| Description | 8 / 15 | Length against the 4,000-character limit. Weighted higher on Google Play, where the description is indexed for search. |
| Screenshots | 12 | Number of screenshots on the public listing (up to 10 per device on the App Store, 8 on Google Play). |
| Average rating | 12 | Public average rating in the selected country. |
| Rating volume | 10 | Number of ratings in the selected country. |
| Localization | 7 | Number of declared app languages (App Store only; Google Play does not publish this). |
| Update recency | 7 | Days since the last update. |
| Target keyword coverage | 10 | Only if you enter a target keyword: whether its words appear in the indexed fields. |
Character limits follow Apple’s App Store Connect documentation (name 30, subtitle 30, keywords 100 bytes, promotional text 170, description 4,000) and Google Play Console documentation (title 30, short description 80, full description 4,000).
Competitor insights
The Competitor Analysis highlights cases where an app with a smaller public audience signal outranks a larger one. “Smaller” means less than half the rating count (or, on Google Play when counts are missing, a lower install bracket). The note about title relevance only reports whether the keyword words are present in each title; it does not claim to know the stores’ ranking algorithms.
Credits
Country flags are drawn with the Twemoji flag font (CC-BY 4.0). App names, icons and screenshots belong to their respective owners and are shown as returned by the stores.