Keyword Relevance vs. Popularity
Relevance is Apple's internal judgment of whether a keyword genuinely matches your app's metadata; popularity is a separate measure of how much total search demand that keyword has — a term can score high on one and low on the other.
These are commonly conflated but answer different questions. Relevance determines eligibility: whether your app can appear for a search at all, based on metadata match. Popularity, as ASOGrade and similar tools surface it, measures how many people search that term in the first place, independent of whether your app matches it.
A keyword can have very high popularity but low relevance to your specific app — targeting it would be pointless even if you could technically rank, because the searchers don't want what you offer. Conversely, a keyword can be perfectly relevant to your app but have low popularity, meaning few people search it regardless of how well you'd rank.
The keywords worth prioritizing sit at the intersection: genuinely relevant to what your app does, with popularity high enough to matter, and difficulty low enough to be winnable. Missing any one of the three wastes the character slot.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I force relevance for a high-popularity keyword my app doesn't really match?
- Putting the word in your metadata may get you indexed for it, but weak genuine relevance tends to show up as poor conversion and retention from that traffic, which then works against your ranking on that same term over time.
Related terms
- Keyword PopularityKeyword popularity is a 0–100 score measuring how often users search for a given term in the App Store, derived from Apple Search Ads demand signals.
- Keyword DifficultyKeyword difficulty is a 0–100 score estimating how hard it is to break into the top-ranking positions for a given App Store keyword, based on the strength of apps currently holding those positions.
- App Store Search Ranking FactorsApp Store search ranking factors are the signals Apple's algorithm uses to determine which apps appear at the top of results for a given keyword — primarily metadata relevance, user engagement, and app quality indicators.
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Put this into practice
Score App Store keywords by popularity and difficulty across 109 storefronts — the numbers behind keyword relevance vs. popularity.
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