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The 100-character keyword field
App Store Connect gives you a field nobody ever sees: 100 characters of keywords, indexed for search and invisible on your product page. It is the highest-leverage text in an iOS submission and the most commonly wasted, because the rules governing it are not written anywhere in the interface.
Four rules the interface doesn't tell you
Apple recombines across fields
Words in your title, subtitle and keyword field are pooled and recombined into phrases. If your title already says "Dream", writing dream again in the keyword field buys nothing — the pair dream journal is already reachable if journal is anywhere in the pool. Repetition is the single largest source of wasted characters.
Commas, no spaces
A space after a comma is a character spent on nothing. dream,journal,sleep fits three words where dream, journal, sleep fits fewer. Across 100 characters this is typically five to eight characters recovered — a whole extra keyword.
Split your phrases
Writing dream journal as a phrase stores both words but signals nothing extra, because the recombination already produces that pair. Store the parts. The exception is a phrase whose words you would not otherwise include at all.
Skip the words the store already knows
Your app name, your developer name, the word "app", the category name, and common stopwords are either indexed already or carry no discriminating power. They are characters spent on a search you were going to appear in anyway.
Does the order matter?
Apple has never stated that it does, and outside measurement cannot separate order effects from everything else moving at the same time. Treat order as unknown and spend your attention on which words are in the field rather than where.
What does matter is which words you drop when 100 characters won't fit everything. That decision should be made on demand — is this term suggested by the store's autocomplete at all — not on which word sounds most important.
The second locale most developers leave empty
An app localised for Turkish typically fills tr and leaves en-GB blank. But the App Store indexes a second locale's keyword field alongside the first in several storefronts — meaning a blank en-GB is 100 characters left on the table at zero cost.
The same applies in reverse for English-first apps distributing in markets where a second locale is indexed. It costs one form field and no translation work if the words are already the ones you track.
Doing this arithmetic
The packing itself is mechanical: dedupe against title and subtitle, drop stopwords, split phrases, join with commas, count to 100. We publish it as a page that runs entirely in your browser — nothing typed into it reaches a server, which matters when the words belong to a version you haven't shipped.
- Keyword field packer — no account, no server.
- Inside Storelift the same auditor runs against your live store page and orders the leftovers by measured demand rather than by the order you typed them.
Frequently asked
Does the keyword field still matter after Apple's semantic matching change?
Yes. Apple moved toward matching intent rather than exact tokens in June 2025, which widened the set of searches a given word can serve — it did not remove the field or stop indexing it. What changed is that phrase-stuffing matters less and covering distinct concepts matters more.
Should I put my competitors' names in the keyword field?
Apple's guidelines prohibit using trademarked terms you do not own, and submissions have been rejected for it. Beyond the risk, it rarely works: ranking for a competitor's brand name puts you in front of people who already decided.
How many characters do most apps actually use?
Fewer than they think, because repetition against the title and spaces after commas both consume the budget invisibly. Running an existing field through a packer typically frees fifteen to thirty characters without removing a single concept.
Is there a keyword field on Google Play?
No. Play indexes your title, short description and full description, which means the equivalent work is written for humans and for the index at the same time — a harder constraint than a hidden field nobody reads.
See this for your own app
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