App Store keyword tracking is the practice of following your app’s position in Apple App Store search results for specific keywords, over time. Instead of guessing whether your app is easy to find, you watch concrete positions — and how they move week to week.

Why keyword tracking matters

Most App Store discovery still happens through search. A user types a term, and your app either appears near the top, further down, or not at all. The position you hold for a keyword is a direct signal of how findable you are for that intent. Tracking turns that signal into something you can manage:

  • You see which keywords actually send your app to the top of results.
  • You notice drops early, before they quietly cost you installs.
  • You can connect ranking changes to the metadata changes you made.

Positions are not the same in every country

The Apple App Store is organised into storefronts, and search results differ between countries. The same keyword can rank your app at position 7 in the United States and position 23 in Germany. That is why serious tracking is done per country and storefront, not as a single global number. Comparing markets shows you where you are already strong and where there is room to grow.

A simple example

Say you publish a fitness app. You track “fitness tracker”, “home workout” and “step counter” across the US, UK and Germany. After a metadata update you see “fitness tracker” climb four places in the US but “home workout” slip in Germany. The comparison tells you exactly where to focus your next round of optimisation.

How updating rankings works in KWRDS

In KWRDS keyword tracking you add the keywords you care about for an app, choose the countries and storefronts, and update the rankings inside the app to retrieve current positions. You then review the latest positions and the change versus before. Rankings are updated when you refresh them — they are not updated automatically in the background today.

What to track (and what to skip)

You do not need to track everything. Focus on keywords that are relevant to what your app does, realistic for your size, and specific enough to convert. Broad one-word terms are competitive; long-tail combinations are often easier to win and attract more intentful users. A keyword network is a good way to find those combinations before you commit tracking slots to them.

Keep in mind that the number of actively tracked ranking keywords can be limited depending on your plan. That limit is separate from the metadata keywords you plan in the editor, which are not limited — see the difference on the pricing page.

Turning tracking into decisions

Tracking is only useful if it changes what you do. A practical loop looks like this: pick target keywords, plan your metadata around them, apply the metadata in App Store Connect, then track the positions to see whether the change helped. Over a few cycles you build a clear picture of which keywords reward your effort.

Sources

Apple may change its App Store rules. Always check the official Apple documentation.