How an App Store keyword rank is measured
“Where does my app rank for this keyword?” sounds like it should have one simple answer. It mostly does, as long as you are careful about three things: what list you are counting in, how deep that list goes, and which store it came from.
A rank is a position in a list
Apple's public App Store search returns an ordered list of apps for a phrase. Your rank is your position in that list: first is #1, the twelfth app is #12. BirikiAso asks the same public search a person's query goes through and reads the position off the answer.
That is an observation. Nothing is modelled or estimated, and the day it was taken is stored with it.
“Not in the 200 returned” is not rank 201
Apple returns up to 200 results for a phrase, and often fewer. In our own scans the depth ranged from 113 to 198 for ordinary game keywords. If your app is not in the list, the honest answer is “not in the 200 results returned”. You cannot say it is at 201, or 250, or “just outside the top 200”: the list ended and your app was not on it.
This matters when you compare keywords. A tool that turns “not found” into 201 makes a phrase where you are absent look almost as good as one where you are #195. BirikiAso keeps the two apart, and every derived number treats “not returned” as missing, never as a very low rank.
The depth is part of the reading
“#40 of 198” and “#40 of 60” are different situations. In the first, forty apps stand in front of you in a crowded field. In the second, Apple ran out of relevant apps quickly, and the phrase may be narrower than it looks. BirikiAso prints how many apps Apple returned beside every rank for this reason.
Two stores are two rooms
The United States and Türkiye return different apps, in a different order, for the same phrase. A rank in one says nothing about the other. So an app saved for the US and the same app saved for Türkiye are tracked separately. Nothing adds them up, averages them, or picks your “best market” for you.
One day is evidence, not a verdict
Ranks move from day to day, and metadata changes take time to show up in search. A single reading after an update tells you where you are today, not whether the update worked. BirikiAso checks every saved keyword on the server once a day, so a keyword builds a history even on days nobody opens the app. The trend comes from those daily points.
What the other columns are
- Field (0–100) describes how hard the top of the list is: how many ratings the top ten have, how many of them carry the phrase in their title, and how many small apps get into the top twenty. It describes the competition, not demand.
- Popularity is Apple Ads' own relative 0–100 score for the phrase, the same in every store. See what Apple Ads popularity is.
- Opportunity is our estimate combining the two with relevance and your current rank. It shows its inputs, and it is marked “low” when an input is missing.
Every one of them sits next to the rank, never in place of it.