Storelift › Guides › Keyword difficulty, with the formula printed
Keyword difficulty, with the formula printed
Every ASO tool shows a difficulty score between 0 and 100, and almost none of them say how it is produced. That matters more than it sounds: most of those scores take Apple's advertising popularity as an input, and that signal broke in September 2025. A score you cannot inspect is a score you cannot audit when its input fails.
Two inputs, and nothing else
1 · The wall. The median review count of the ten apps ranking for the term. Review count is a combined proxy for age, installs and satisfaction, and it is the only public signal with a measurable effect on rank. The median rather than the mean, deliberately: a single 18,000-review outlier drags an average into a number nobody can reach.
2 · Title matches. How many of those ten carry the term in their app title. This says the competitors are targeting the term on purpose rather than ranking for it by accident.
That is the whole input list. Demand is not in it, and neither is your own rank or any download estimate — mixing difficulty and demand into one number destroys the distinction between hard but worth it and easy but worthless.
The arithmetic
The wall carries a weight of 70 and title matches 30. The wall is heavier because it represents an accumulation that takes years to overcome; a title match can change in a day with a metadata edit.
The wall is scaled logarithmically. Going from 100 reviews to 1,000 is not the same increase in difficulty as going from 10,000 to 100,000, and a linear scale would put almost every real keyword at the top of the range.
| Component | Formula | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Wall | log₁₀(median reviews) ÷ 5 × 70 | 0–70 |
| Title matches | matches ÷ 10 × 30 | 0–30 |
| Score | wall + title matches | 0–100 |
So a term where the top ten have a median of 1,000 reviews and three of them carry the term in the title scores 42 + 9 = 51. You can do that by hand from the numbers on the same screen, which is the point.
What a score cannot tell you
A single number flattens a two-dimensional problem. A term can be hard because the incumbents are enormous, or hard because everyone is targeting it — and the response to those two situations is completely different. That is why the product shows the wall and the title matches separately next to the score rather than only the total.
The score also says nothing about whether the term is worth winning. Demand sits in its own column, from store autocomplete, with no volume number attached.
Frequently asked
Why publish the formula at all?
Because a difficulty score is a claim about the world, and a claim you cannot check is a claim you have to take on trust. The formula is also small enough to verify by hand from the same screen, which is the strongest form of the argument.
Does the score use Apple's popularity data?
No. Both inputs are read from the search result itself. That is why the score kept working when Apple's advertising popularity signal collapsed in September 2025 — nothing in it depends on that number.
Is a score of 51 good or bad?
Neither on its own. It is a comparison device: it tells you which of your candidate terms are cheaper to attack. Paired with the demand column and your current rank, it becomes a decision; alone it is trivia.
See this for your own app
Paste your store link, add your keywords. Rank, the apps above you and demand are measured every night.
Start free →