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What happened to the Apple Search Ads popularity score?

Most ASO tools show a single "search volume" number, and it almost always comes from the same place: the Apple Ads keyword popularity score. In autumn 2025 that score largely stopped being usable. This page covers what happened, what the score never was, and which signal can take its place.

Updated: 2026-08-13

What the score actually is

Search Popularity is a relative index Apple produces inside its advertising console to guide bidding. It runs from 5 to 100, with 5 as the floor. Three things follow:

It is not search volume. It never gives you "12,000 searches a month" — it ranks terms against each other.
It wasn't built for organic search. Its purpose is ad bidding; the relationship to organic ranking is indirect.
It doesn't exist everywhere. Apple Ads runs in 91 countries and regions; the App Store is in 175. The gap is storefronts where the score has never existed.

September 2025

In a four-day window starting 29 September 2025, the number of US App Store keywords with popularity above the floor fell from 165,875 to 39,254 — a 77.4% drop. Most keywords that had carried values between 20 and 60 began returning the lowest possible value.

In October 2025 Apple began returning scores through the API only for terms above a threshold; keywords below it now carry no popularity data at all. In the same period a monthly, aggregated "Search Term Rank" report appeared in Insights, in beta.

For small apps the consequence is sharp: the most valuable keywords were exactly the ones that disappeared. The 20-35 band is where terms have enough search to drive installs but not enough competition to be unreachable. The signal that showed that band went dark.

Why this is a tooling problem, not just an Apple problem

This didn't hit one vendor. It hit every tool that derives demand from that score, at the same moment. If a tool's "volume" column emptied overnight, that column was being copied from Apple's ad console.

The question worth asking any tool: where does this number come from, and can I go look at the same source myself? A metric with no answer to that is a metric you lose the day its source changes.

What to use instead

There is a demand signal independent of the ad console that works in every storefront: the store's own autocomplete. The terms Apple suggests as a user types are the things actually being searched in that storefront.

Is the term suggested at all? If it never is, ranking for it buys nothing — even at position 1.
How many variants complete from it? A stem with many completions indicates real search behaviour in that area.
In which country? The signal is per-storefront and works where Apple Ads doesn't exist.

This signal does not produce a volume number. Saying so is better than inventing one. Storelift builds its demand column from this source and prints the source on screen.

Frequently asked

Is the popularity score useless now?

It still has a job on the ad side: ranking terms against each other when bidding in an Apple Ads campaign. As a basis for organic ASO decisions it no longer stands alone — the value range narrowed and it is absent in a large share of storefronts.

Doesn't the new Search Term Rank report fill the gap?

Partly. It is monthly, aggregated, row-limited, restricted to terms above a threshold, still in beta, and requires an Apple Ads account. It is not a series you can make daily decisions on.

Does Storelift use the score at all?

No. Demand comes from autocomplete and rank is counted from the store's search result. Neither depends on an Apple Ads account, and both work in storefronts where Apple Ads doesn't operate.

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