How the scores work
AsoKey has no private install data, and neither Apple nor Google publish search volume. Every number here is derived from public store endpoints, so it is an estimate built from observable signals. The breakdowns are shown for every keyword so you can judge them instead of trusting a black box.
Where the data comes from
- App Store
- The iTunes Search API for ranked results and app metadata, Apple's search hints (autocomplete) endpoint with the storefront of the selected country, and the public customer-reviews RSS feed for written reviews.
- Google Play
- The public Play Store web endpoints for search, app detail pages, query suggestions and reviews, scoped to the selected country and language.
- Ratings by country
- The same public lookup used for an app's detail page, repeated across the 50 supported storefronts. A missing listing means the app is not for sale there, not a zero-star score.
- Review summary
- Recent written reviews from the selected country and a handful of other high-volume storefronts. An LLM (via the Vercel AI Gateway, using a cheap nano model) extracts recurring pros, cons and noteworthy comments. It is a theme read, not a complete census of every review. The summary is stored in Vercel Blob and refreshed at most once a week for the same app.
- Caching
- Store responses are cached in memory for one to twelve hours so repeated research is fast and the stores are not hammered. AI review summaries persist across instances in Vercel Blob for seven days.
Traffic (0-100)
- Store autocomplete · 50%
- Whether the store suggests the phrase, after how few characters, and how high in the list. Stores order suggestions by real query popularity, which makes this the strongest public demand signal available.
- Audience of ranked apps · 30%
- Rating volume of the apps that already rank for the phrase, on a log scale. Big audiences cluster around queries that carry traffic.
- Query breadth · 20%
- One- and two-word head terms attract far more searches than long tails.
Difficulty (0-100)
- Rating volume · 30%
- Average rating count of the top ten, log scaled. This is the main barrier for a new app.
- Title targeting · 25%
- How many top results put the exact phrase in their app name, weighted towards the top positions.
- Update cadence · 20%
- How recently the incumbents shipped. Actively maintained apps are harder to displace.
- Deliberate competitors · 15%
- Share of the top ten optimising for the phrase in title or subtitle.
- Rating quality · 10%
- Average star rating of established results.
Chance
- Geometric mean
chance = √(traffic × (100 − difficulty))— a keyword has to be both reachable and worth reaching. Anything that scores well on one axis alone stays mid-table.
App keyword discovery
- Listing metadata
- The same extraction used in competitor teardowns: phrases from the app name, short description and full description, weighted by field and repetition.
- Store autocomplete
- Those seeds are expanded through the store's own suggestion endpoint so the shortlist includes phrases people actually type, not only what the listing contains.
- Live rank check
- Up to 25 candidates are searched in the selected country. Only phrases where the app appears in the scanned results are returned, ordered by position.
Known limits
- Search results are a proxy
- Store search is personalised and A/B tested. Public endpoints return a neutral ordering, which is close to, but not identical to, what a given user sees.
- iOS subtitle and keyword field
- Apple's public API does not expose an app's subtitle or its private 100-character keyword field, so competitor teardowns on iOS cover the app name and description only.
- Play rating counts
- Google Play search results omit rating counts, so they are pulled from each app's detail page. Where only an install bucket exists, roughly one rating per hundred installs is assumed.
- Discovery is a shortlist
- Automatic keyword discovery probes the strongest candidates from the listing and autocomplete, not every possible query in the store. Add extras on the Keywords screen when you want a specific phrase checked.
- Reviews are a sample
- Apple's public RSS feed caps written reviews at a few hundred recent comments per country. Play returns a language-scoped page of recent reviews, not every rating. The AI summary therefore reflects recent, vocal users more than the full history.