How to Track App Store Keyword Rankings Over Time

Track 20 to 60 keywords: the ones in your name, subtitle and keyword field, the ones you plan to test and a handful of control keywords that you do not touch. Changing the tracked set weekly destroys the comparison. Add new keywords on a known date and mark it.

Rank is per storefront. Use your top three markets first, then add others. A storefront is a country or region, and LocalASO checks 52 of them (storefront glossary). The more countries and keywords, the more checks you need, as the next step shows.

Apple states the iTunes Search API is limited to approximately 20 calls per minute, subject to change (Apple: iTunes Search API). One rank check is at least one search. For 40 keywords in 5 countries that is 200 checks, or about 10 minutes at 20 per minute, per daily run. That is why serious tools throttle and cache. If you track by hand, plan on a small set.

Apple says updated app information may take up to 24 hours to appear (Apple), so mark both the edit date and the date it went live.

• One-day jumps of a few places are normal. Wait for a second reading.
• A move on many keywords at once points to something broad: a new version, new ratings, a seasonal shift or a store-wide change. See why your ranking dropped.
• A move on only the keywords you edited is the signal you want. Compare it to your control keywords.
• A move on only the control means your test is not clean.

Apple says search depends on text relevance and on user behavior such as downloads, ratings and reviews (Apple), so rank can move even when you change nothing.

Once a week, sort by change and look at the top five gainers and losers. Match each to the change log. The result is a short list of what worked, which feeds the next edit. The quick win keywords guide shows what to do with phrases that sit just outside the top 10.

A spreadsheet with one tab per country and a weekly manual search works for under 15 keywords. Past that, the time cost grows quickly. The free keyword overlap tools help with the metadata side but do not track rank.

After each review write one sentence per change: "Added adhd, entered top 50 in three days, now 41." Over a year these sentences become the record of what moves your rankings, and they are much easier to reuse than a chart alone.

LocalASO stores a daily rank history for every keyword and country in a database on your Mac and shows it as a small chart. Checks stay under Apple's public search limits with a limiter and a 6-hour cache, and ranks are read from public search results. See the keyword research docs and the ranking by country guide.