TL;DR. Apple Ads — Apple renamed Search Ads in April 2025 — scores every keyword you type into its campaign builder with a Search Popularity rating from 1 to 5, Apple’s own indicator of how much App Store search demand that term has. You can reach this screen without a live campaign or a payment method on file, so it costs nothing but a few minutes to check candidate keywords before you commit them to your 100-character keyword field. It is not a ranking factor and running paid campaigns has no documented effect on organic rank — treat it purely as a free demand signal, not a growth hack.

Most indie developers pick keywords by instinct: what they’d type if they were searching for their own app, maybe a competitor’s title copied into the keyword field. That works until two similarly-plausible keywords compete for the same character budget and you have no way to tell which one actual users are typing. Apple already collects that answer. It just surfaces it inside the ad platform, not the ASO tooling.

What is Apple Ads’ Search Popularity score?

Search Popularity is a number from 1 to 5 that Apple Ads shows next to any keyword you enter, with 5 meaning the most popular. Apple’s own glossary describes it as “a relative indicator of an Apple Ads keyword’s popularity,” designed to show which keywords “might be most important for promoting your app” — it’s App Store search volume, scored by Apple, not a third-party estimate.

It shows up in two places: the keyword suggestions Apple Ads generates from your app’s metadata and category, and the score attached to any keyword you type in manually while building an ad group. Either way, the number comes from actual App Store search activity in the country you’re viewing, not a guess.

Do I have to run a paid campaign to see it?

No. You need an Apple Ads account tied to your App Store Connect account and a live app, but you can walk through campaign creation as far as the keyword step without adding a payment method — Apple’s own documentation is explicit that ads only start running once a valid payment method is added, and even then, a paused campaign stays paused.

Practically: sign up at ads.apple.com/app-store with your App Store Connect account holder credentials, start creating a campaign for your live app, and get to the ad group’s keyword selection step. That’s where Search Popularity displays for every suggested and manually-entered keyword. If you go far enough to add billing, set the campaign to Paused immediately — nothing serves and nothing charges. New App Store advertisers also get a one-time $100 credit automatically, so even a live campaign is effectively free to test for a while, but you don’t need to spend anything just to read the scores.

Does running Apple Ads help my organic App Store ranking?

No — and Apple has never published anything saying otherwise. Organic search ranking and Apple Ads placements are separate systems: one is Apple’s search algorithm, the other is a paid auction. There’s no documented mechanism where ad spend or Search Match activity feeds into organic rank, so don’t run campaigns as an indirect ranking play.

Any install volume or engagement you get from paid traffic can indirectly help the way any quality install helps — more ratings, more retention signal — but that’s true of every install regardless of source, not something specific to Apple Ads. Keep the two goals separate: use Apple Ads’ keyword data for research, and treat any organic movement afterward as a research payoff, not an ad-spend payoff.

How do I actually use this with a 100-character keyword field?

Build your candidate keyword list the way you already do — competitor titles, category terms, what support tickets and reviews call your app — then check each candidate’s Search Popularity before you spend characters on it. A relevant term scoring 4 or 5 is a better use of limited keyword-field space than a relevant term scoring 1 or 2, all else equal.

A few things to watch:

  • Score is per storefront. Search Popularity reflects demand in whichever country your campaign targets. If you localize your keyword field per locale, pull a separate score for each storefront you actually support — a term popular in the U.S. store can be flat in Germany.
  • It’s a demand signal, not a relevance filter. A high score on an irrelevant keyword is still wasted characters, and can get your app removed from search entirely if it’s spam-level unrelated to your app’s function. Popularity only matters among terms that are already legitimately relevant to what your app does.
  • Don’t duplicate title words. This tool tells you what’s worth including — it doesn’t change the underlying rule that repeating a word already in your title inside the keyword field wastes space, since Apple already indexes title words for search.
  • Re-check after big App Store changes. Search Popularity is live data, not a one-time report. Revisit it whenever you’re about to submit a version with keyword-field changes, using the same keyword selection framework you’d otherwise apply from instinct alone.