Search Popularity

What it's still good for

It still has a job on the paid side — ranking terms against each other when bidding inside an Apple Ads campaign. As a basis for organic ASO decisions it no longer stands alone: the covered range narrowed and it's absent in a large share of storefronts.

How the Search Popularity scale works

The scale runs from 5 to 100, and 5 is the floor: a term at 5 is below the threshold Apple reports on, not a term searched five times. The score is relative — it ranks terms against each other — and does not convert into a number of searches per month.

It is only available where Apple Ads runs. Apple Ads is live in 91 countries and regions, while the App Store has 175 storefronts, so in many storefronts there is no Search Popularity value at all.

What changed in 2025

Between 29 September and 3 October 2025, the number of U.S. terms with a popularity above 5 fell from 165,875 to 39,254 — a drop of 77.4%. From October 2025 the API scores only terms above the threshold, and Apple added a monthly Search Term Rank report (beta) under Insights.

For organic ASO this means the score covers mainly the head terms. A long-tail keyword that used to show a low score now usually shows nothing, which is not the same as having no searches. The measurements and sources are on the full Search Popularity guide.

Search Popularity vs search demand

Where the score is missing, a search demand signal still works in every storefront: is the term searched, and how many variants branch off it. The two answer slightly different questions — a relative score on one side, presence and breadth on the other — compared in search demand vs Search Popularity and defined under demand signal.

How to use Search Popularity in ASO today

On the paid side the score still does its original job: ranking candidate terms against each other when you build or prune an Apple Ads campaign in one country.

For organic decisions, treat it as one piece of evidence. A score above the floor tells you a term has real volume in that storefront. A missing score tells you less than it used to — only that the term is below Apple's threshold or outside the 91 Apple Ads markets. Compare scores within one storefront only; a 40 in one country and a 40 in another are not the same number of searches.

If you run Apple Ads, the useful view is organic rank and paid spend side by side, which is what Storelift's Apple Ads page shows.

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