How to choose an ASO tool

The five questions

1. Where does the demand number come from?

If the answer is a search-volume column, ask what produces it. Most of the category derives volume from Apple's advertising popularity score — a relative index for ad bidding that collapsed in September 2025 and exists only in the 91 countries where Apple Ads runs. A tool that says "autocomplete" or "we don't show volume" is making a smaller claim, which is not the same as knowing less.

2. What does it show on a day it couldn't measure?

This is the question that separates tools most sharply and almost nobody asks it. Three states must stay distinct: ranked at N, measured but not in the results, and measurement failed. A tool that draws a failed measurement as rank 0 puts a crash in your chart that never happened — and you will spend an afternoon looking for the cause of a drop that didn't occur.

3. How deep does it actually look?

"Not ranked" is meaningless without a depth. iOS search returns 100 results; Google Play has no official search endpoint and its page returns roughly 20–30 at a time. A tool that prints the depth it saw is telling you what "not ranked" means. One that doesn't is letting you assume it means zero.

4. How often is each country really measured?

"Daily" is a claim about the schedule, not about your account. Measurement cost scales with keywords × countries; a plan advertising 150 keywords across 128 countries cannot measure all of them every day at any price. Ask what the refresh cycle is for your configuration, and whether the tool shows it on screen.

5. Can you verify one number by hand?

Pick a keyword, open the store, search it yourself. If the tool's rank is close, the measurement is real. If the tool can't tell you which search produced the number, you cannot check it — and a number you can't check is a number you're trusting rather than using.

Three things not worth choosing on

• Keyword count, unless you have genuinely hit the limit. Most portfolios track fewer than a hundred terms per app and buy thousands.
• Download and revenue estimates. No vendor publishes an error rate for them. A number with an unknown error bar is a decoration.
• Dashboard density. The number of charts on the home screen has no relationship to whether the underlying measurement is sound.

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