Rank tracking

01The number that matters is the depth limit

iOS's public search surface returns up to 200 results per storefront — "not ranked" means "not in the top 200", not "rank zero". Google Play offers no official search endpoint at all; its search page returns roughly the top 30 at a time, and an honest tracker prints that limit rather than implying it goes deeper.

Country matters as much as depth: each storefront runs its own search index, so the same term can sit 3rd in one country and outside the top 200 in another.

02Three answers, not two

A tracker asks the store a question and gets one of three answers, and they are not interchangeable: the app is at position N; the app was searched for and is not in the result set; or the measurement itself failed — the store did not answer, or answered with something unusable.

Folding the last two together is the most common flaw in rank data. "Not in the results" is information about the app; "the measurement failed" is information about the tracker. A chart that draws both as a gap at the bottom tells you your rank collapsed on a day when nothing happened except a timeout.

03How often is often enough

Store search does not move by the minute. Rank responds to metadata changes, version releases, ratings and seasonality — all of which move on the scale of days. A daily pass captures that; an hourly pass mostly captures the store's own noise and costs the endpoint budget you need for depth and breadth.

What a daily pass cannot do is tell you why. A rank change on the same day as a version release is a plausible pair, not a proven cause — which is why change markers belong on the chart and conclusions do not.

04What rank tracking cannot tell you

• Whether anyone searches the term. Rank 1 on a term nobody types is worth nothing; demand is a separate measurement.
• How many installs the rank produced. Position is not traffic; the stores do not attribute installs to a search position from the outside.
• Why you moved. Neither store publishes ranking weights; a tracker sees the result, not the mechanism.
• Your rank in a storefront it does not measure. Coverage is a claim that has to be verified per storefront, not assumed.

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