The 100-Character Keyword Field: How to Not Waste a Single One

The App Store keyword field is a single text input, one hundred characters long, invisible to users, and worth more to your visibility than your entire description. Most apps use about sixty of those characters productively.

Here is how to use all one hundred.

What the field is and where it sits

In App Store Connect, under the version’s App Information for each localisation, there is a field labelled Keywords. Apple’s own product page guidance covers the surrounding fields. It accepts up to 100 characters, comma-separated, and nothing you write in it is ever shown to a user.

It is indexed for search ranking. Your description is not. That asymmetry is the single most important structural fact about App Store metadata, and it is why App Store listings and Google Play listings should never be the same text.

The rules, in order of how much they save you

1. No spaces after commas

recipe, menu, grocery, list is 27 characters. recipe,menu,grocery,list is 24.

Three characters recovered on four terms. On a full field you typically recover eight to twelve — enough for one more keyword.

2. Never repeat a word from your name or subtitle

Apple already associates your app with every word in your app name and subtitle. Repeating one in the keyword field spends characters for zero additional coverage.

If your name is ReelMeal: Meal Planner and your subtitle is Weekly menus & grocery lists, then meal, planner, weekly, menus, grocery and lists are all already covered. Writing any of them again is pure waste.

This is the single most common mistake, and it typically wastes fifteen to twenty-five characters.

3. Use singular forms

Apple handles most plural forms automatically in English and most Latin-script locales. recipe covers recipes. Writing both spends eight characters on nothing.

Irregular plurals — person/people, child/children — are worth testing separately, because automatic handling is less reliable there.

4. Leave out your category and the word “app”

Apple knows your category. Writing food in a Food & Drink app’s keyword field is redundant. So is app — every result is an app.

5. No competitor brand names

It violates the App Review Guidelines, it gets listings rejected, and it does not work anyway. Apple’s handling of brand terms strongly favours the trademark owner.

6. Skip stop words

the, and, for, with, your. Apple ignores them for ranking. Every one you type is a character donated to nobody.

Combinations: the part people miss

Apple does not only match the exact strings you write. It constructs combinations across your app name, subtitle and keyword field.

If your metadata contains:

• Name: ReelMeal: Meal Planner
• Subtitle: Weekly menus & grocery lists
• Keyword field: recipe,organizer,cookbook,dinner,pantry,batch,cooking,budget

Then you are eligible for terms you never literally wrote:

• meal organizer
• weekly recipe planner
• grocery budget
• dinner planner
• batch cooking planner

This changes how you should think about the field. You are not writing a list of keywords. You are assembling a vocabulary whose combinations cover your target terms.

The practical consequence: when a target phrase is two words, you often only need each word once, in any of the three fields. Writing the full phrase is usually wasteful.

Order does not matter, proximity does not matter

Within the keyword field, position carries no weight. recipe,dinner and dinner,recipe are identical. Do not spend time optimising sequence.

Across fields it does matter — the name carries more weight than the subtitle, which carries more than the keyword field. Put your single most valuable term in the name.

A before and after

Before (a real pattern, lightly anonymised):

Name:     RecipeBox
Subtitle: The best recipe app for cooking
Keywords: recipe, recipes, cooking, cook, food, meal, meals, app, kitchen, best

Problems: recipe repeated between subtitle and keywords, both singular and plural forms, the word app, the category term food, spaces after commas, and best — which nobody searches. Roughly 44 of 100 characters do any work.

After:

Name:     RecipeBox: Meal Planner
Subtitle: Weekly menus & grocery list
Keywords: organizer,cookbook,dinner,pantry,shopping,batch,prep,menu,ingredient,diet

No repeats across fields, no plurals, no stop words, no category name, no spaces. Every character is buying coverage, and the combinations now reach meal organizer, weekly dinner menu, grocery shopping list, meal prep planner and several dozen more.

Localisation: the free characters most apps ignore

Each localisation gets its own 100-character keyword field. That is not just translation — it is additional keyword capacity.

Two things are worth knowing:

Locale inheritance. Some App Store locales fall back to others. English (UK), English (Australia) and several more can inherit from English (US) if not set separately. Setting them separately gives you a second and third independent 100 characters targeting the same language — a substantial free win that most apps never claim.

Language-specific tokenisation. Japanese, Korean and Chinese do not separate words with spaces, and the store tokenises them differently. Comma-separating a transliterated English list into a Japanese field wastes most of it.

A checklist before you ship

• No spaces after commas
• No word repeated between name, subtitle and keyword field
• Singular forms only (except irregular plurals)
• No category name, no app, no stop words
• No competitor trademarks
• All 100 characters used
• Combinations checked against your target keyword list
• Additional English locales filled in separately

Working through that list by hand is possible, and tedious enough that most people skip the last three items. ASOnest’s metadata workspace does the arithmetic for you — character counts per field and locale, duplicate detection across name, subtitle and keyword field, and the combinations your draft actually makes you eligible for. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, no card required.