What Apple Ads popularity is, and what it isn't

Most ASO tools show a “popularity” or “search volume” column, and almost all of them get the number from the same place: the Apple Ads platform. Apple does not publish search counts. What it does publish, to anyone with an Apple Ads account, is a relative popularity score from 0 to 100 for a phrase.

We connected a read-only Apple Ads API user to BirikiAso in September 2026 and measured what that number actually is before putting it on screen. This is what we found.

You do not need a campaign

The keyword suggestion endpoint answered on an account with no campaigns, no spend and no card on file. A read-only API user is enough. The app you name as the “promoted” app does not change the answer either: two different apps got the same rows and the same values for the same phrases.

It is one number for every store

We asked for 40 keywords one at a time, once scoped to the United States and once to Türkiye. All 40 came back with identical popularity. A US-scoped request also returned German, French, Japanese and Korean phrases.

So popularity is a property of the phrase, not of a market. BirikiAso shows it once per keyword and labels it as the same in every store. It never prints it as a US figure or a Türkiye figure, because Apple does not give one.

5 means “too small to say”

The lowest value Apple returned was 5, and it returned it a lot: 62 of the 137 phrases we track sat exactly there. Across 5,359 phrases Apple has suggested to us, the median was 7, the 90th percentile 27 and the 99th percentile 57.

A value of 5 is best read as “below Apple's resolution”, not as a measurement of 5. BirikiAso prints it as Low, never as a number.

It is relative, not a count

Popularity tells you that one phrase is searched more than another. It does not tell you how many people searched either of them, and nothing in the API converts it into searches per day. Any tool that shows a daily search count has built it from its own model on top of this score, or from other data.

BirikiAso shows Apple's number as Apple gives it: 0–100, one value per phrase, “Low” at the floor. It does not turn it into a volume.

A phrase is a seed, not a lookup

The endpoint takes a terms filter, and it is easy to read that as “give me the popularity of these phrases”. It is not. Sending 20 phrases at once returned about 360 related suggestions, and only 8 of the 20 we asked about were among them. Sent one at a time, every tracked phrase came back with its own value.

That behaviour is useful in a different way. Each seed returns up to about 200 related phrases that people search, and BirikiAso uses them to decide which keywords its daily crawl should scan next.

What we do with it

• Popularity column. Apple's value beside each tracked keyword. “Low” at the floor, “—” if Apple has not been asked yet.
• Suggestions. Phrases Apple suggested that share a word with your keywords, listed under the table, most popular first. For a game, game vocabulary comes first.
• Opportunity estimate. Popularity is one of four inputs, alongside relevance, how open the field is, and your current rank. It is an estimate and the row prints its inputs. See how it works.

The rule behind all three: if Apple did not return it, you will not read it here.