Real search volume and difficulty for every keyword
Volume tells you a keyword is worth having. Difficulty tells you whether anyone can get it. Winnability tells you whether you can. ASOnest gives you all three for every keyword on both stores.
| Keyword | Volume | Difficulty | Rank | 7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| meal planner | 61 | 34 | #12 | +9 |
| recipe organizer | 38 | 21 | #4 | +14 |
| grocery list maker | 29 | 18 | #7 | +3 |
| weekly menu planner | 24 | 16 | #2 | +6 |
| cookbook app | 31 | 55 | #48 | −2 |
| recipe app | 72 | 88 | — | — |
Most keyword tools are very good at wasting your quarter
Export 4,000 keywords, sort by volume, pick the big ones, write them into your keyword field, wait three months, rank nowhere. Every indie developer has done this at least once.
Volume without context is a trap
"recipe app" has enormous search volume and is owned by apps with six-figure rating counts. Targeting it is not ambition, it is a rounding error in someone else’s traffic.
Difficulty is not one-size-fits-all
A difficulty-40 keyword is trivial for an app with 50,000 ratings and impossible for one with 200. Scoring the keyword alone tells you half the story.
The list is too long to act on
You have room for roughly 30 characters of title, 30 of subtitle and 100 of keyword field. A 4,000-row export is not a plan, it is homework.
Store demand, not a vendor’s guess
App Store popularity comes straight from Apple’s search popularity index. Google Play volume is built from Play’s own demand signals and autocomplete frequency. Both are normalised to a single 0–100 scale so one list can hold both stores without you doing mental conversion.
- Apple search popularity index for every App Store term
- Google Play demand signals and autocomplete frequency
- One shared 0–100 scale across both stores
- Volume history so you can spot seasonal terms before the season
- Every country, each in its own language
Scored against the apps actually ranking today
Difficulty is recomputed from the live top ten rather than a static index, so it reflects the competitive set as it is this week. Winnability then folds in your app’s own rating count, category position and metadata strength.
- 0–100 difficulty, transparent about what feeds it
- Winnability scored against your listing, not an average app
- Recomputed daily as the top ten shifts
- Filter to "reachable in 90 days" and work only that list
The keywords nobody bids on are the ones you can own
Four independent sources feed the suggestion engine, and the overlap between them is where the good terms hide.
Store autocomplete
What real users type, mined per country and per language.
Competitor sets
Every term your tracked rivals rank for, minus the ones you already have.
Review language
The words your users choose when they describe your app to strangers.
Semantic expansion
Related intent your seed list missed, filtered to terms with real demand.
What actually happens when you use it
- 01
Seed from your own listing
ASOnest reads your current title, subtitle, keyword field and description, extracts the terms you are already targeting, and pulls the keywords you rank for today — including the ones you never deliberately chose.
- 02
Expand across four sources
Store autocomplete, competitor keyword sets, review language and semantic expansion each contribute candidates. Duplicates and near-duplicates are merged so the list stays readable.
- 03
Score volume and difficulty
Every candidate gets a popularity figure from the store’s own demand signal and a difficulty score computed from the apps actually ranking for it right now.
- 04
Rank by winnability
Your app’s authority is compared against the current top ten, and the list is re-sorted so the terms you can plausibly reach this quarter sit at the top.
- 05
Send them to tracking
Select the keywords worth watching and they move into daily rank tracking with one click, ready to prove whether your next metadata change worked.
App Store volume is derived from Apple’s own search popularity index — the same 0–100 scale Apple exposes through Search Ads — rather than a third-party model. For Google Play, volume is built from Play search demand signals and autocomplete frequency. Both are normalised to the same 0–100 scale so a keyword list containing both stores stays readable.
Difficulty is a 0–100 estimate of how hard it is to enter the top ten for a keyword. It weighs the rating count and rating velocity of the apps currently ranking, how prominently each of them uses the keyword in its title, subtitle and keyword field, and how stable the top ten has been over the last 90 days. A term dominated by three apps with 500,000 ratings each scores near 100 no matter how tempting the volume looks.
Difficulty describes the keyword. Winnability describes the keyword relative to your app. ASOnest compares your rating count, category position and current metadata strength against the apps in the top ten, then scores how realistic a top-ten finish is for you specifically. Two apps looking at the same difficulty-45 keyword can get very different winnability scores.
One hundred a day on Lite, unlimited on Basic and Pro. They come from four sources: store autocomplete, the keywords your tracked competitors rank for, the language your reviewers actually use, and semantic expansion of your seed terms.
Yes. All countries are included on every plan, and research works for any of them regardless of where your app is currently available, which makes it a reasonable way to size a market before you commit to localising for it.
Yes. Every supported storefront is researched in its own language, including languages that do not use spaces between words. The keyword field builder applies the correct tokenisation rules per locale, which matters a great deal for Japanese, Korean and Chinese listings.
The rest of the toolkit
Start ranking for keywords you can actually win
Add your app, see your real keyword positions in under two minutes, and get a prioritised list of what to change first. 7 days free, no card required.