App Store Keyword Difficulty, Explained Properly
What goes into an app keyword difficulty score, why the same score means different things for different apps, and which keywords are worth targeting.
· by the ASOnest team
Difficulty measures the keyword; winnability measures the keyword relative to your app. A difficulty-40 term is easy for an app with 50,000 ratings and impossible for one with 200. Always read difficulty next to your own rating count, not on its own.
Every ASO tool shows a difficulty score. Almost none of them explain what it is made of, which makes it very easy to misread — and the misreading always goes the same way: a developer sees a low-ish number, assumes it means “achievable”, and spends a quarter finding out it did not.
What difficulty is actually measuring
Difficulty estimates how hard it is to enter the top ten for a search term. Not to rank at all — ranking at position 80 is trivial for almost anything — but to reach a position that produces installs.
It is derived from the apps currently occupying that top ten. The inputs that carry real weight:
Rating count. The dominant factor by a wide margin. Both stores lean heavily on social proof — Apple lists ratings among the factors behind App Store search results — and a top ten averaging 200,000 ratings is a wall that metadata alone does not climb.
Rating velocity. Total ratings tell you where an app has been. Velocity tells you where it is going. An app adding 5,000 ratings a month is harder to displace than one with the same total that stopped growing two years ago.
Keyword prominence in their metadata. An app with the exact search term in its name is the strongest possible relevance signal. Displacing it requires beating it on the other signals decisively.
Top-ten stability. If the same ten apps have held those positions for ninety days, the term is effectively frozen and something structural is holding it in place. High churn in the top ten means openings exist.
Category overlap. Apps ranking for a term outside their primary category are usually ranking on a weaker signal and are easier to pass.
Why the same score means different things
Here is the part most tools skip.
Difficulty is a property of the keyword. Whether you can win it is a property of you and the keyword together.
Consider a term with difficulty 40. The top ten averages 15,000 ratings.
- Your app has 50,000 ratings: you have more social proof than anyone in that top ten. Point your metadata at it and you will likely be in the top five inside six weeks.
- Your app has 300 ratings: you are fifty times short of the weakest incumbent. Perfect metadata gets you to maybe position 25, where nobody will see you.
Same score, opposite decisions. This is why a second number matters.
Winnability: difficulty relative to your app
Winnability compares your own signals — rating count, rating velocity, category position, current metadata strength — against the specific apps in that keyword’s top ten, and answers a more useful question: given what you have today, is a top-ten finish realistic?
In practice this reorders your keyword list substantially. Terms that look mid-difficulty become obvious targets; terms that looked cheap turn out to sit behind an app with unusually strong momentum.
Rough thresholds by app size — useful as a starting point, not a law:
| Your rating count | Target difficulty |
|---|---|
| Under 1,000 | Below 25 |
| 1,000–10,000 | Below 45 |
| 10,000–50,000 | Below 60 |
| Above 50,000 | Below 70 |
Difficulty is not static
A difficulty score is a snapshot of a competitive set that moves. It changes when:
- A large app enters the category or adds the term to its metadata
- A top-ten app’s rating count grows sharply
- An incumbent is delisted, renamed or abandoned
- Seasonal demand shifts which apps invest in the term
Any score older than about a week should be treated as approximate. Recomputing from the live top ten is the only way to keep it honest, which is why difficulty in a spreadsheet you exported last quarter is worse than useless — it is confidently wrong.
Reading difficulty alongside volume
Neither number means anything alone. The pairs that matter:
Low volume, low difficulty. The long tail. Individually small, collectively how most small apps build organic traffic. Target these.
High volume, low difficulty. Rare, and usually temporary — either a new term the market has not caught up with, or a seasonal spike. Move fast when you find one.
Low volume, high difficulty. A niche someone large has decided to own. Skip it; the traffic does not justify the fight.
High volume, high difficulty. The head terms everyone instinctively wants. Correct answer for a small app is almost always to leave them alone and revisit when your rating count has grown by an order of magnitude.
What difficulty does not tell you
Conversion. A keyword can be easy to rank for and still send you users who uninstall immediately. Relevance is your judgement, not the score’s.
Commercial value. free meal planner and meal planner subscription may have similar difficulty and very different revenue per install.
Time to rank. Difficulty is a height, not a duration. Even a very low-difficulty term takes two to four weeks after re-indexing before rank stabilises — see how long ASO takes to work.
The practical rule
Read difficulty next to your own rating count, always. Filter to terms your app can plausibly reach this quarter, target six to ten of them at a time, and revisit the harder list each time your rating count grows meaningfully.
ASOnest computes difficulty from the live top ten daily and scores winnability against your specific app, so the list you work from is already filtered to what you can reach. 7-day free trial, no card, all countries.
Frequently asked questions
It depends entirely on your app's authority. As a rough guide: under 1,000 ratings, target difficulty below 25. Between 1,000 and 10,000 ratings, up to about 45. Above 50,000 ratings, most terms below 70 are realistic. There is no universally good number.
Because difficulty is a model, not a measurement, and every vendor weights the inputs differently. What matters is that a tool's scores are internally consistent, so that a 20 is reliably easier than a 40 within that tool. Comparing absolute scores across tools is not meaningful.
Constantly. A keyword's difficulty is a property of the apps currently ranking for it. A large app entering the category, a competitor's rating count doubling, or a top-ten app being delisted all move it. Any score older than a week is stale.