Why no tool has real popularity for niche App Store keywords
· Jovain Chisholm
Apple only publishes popularity for the top 500 search terms in each of 15 genre buckets per country. Niche keywords never make that list, and Apple's old per-keyword score has sat at its floor for most terms since September 2025. Any number a tool shows for a niche keyword is an estimate.
Where App Store popularity comes from
The only first-party popularity number for App Store search is in Apple Ads. Its search term report returns the top 500 terms per genre per country. Apple groups terms into 15 buckets, and each term sits in exactly one of them. Any other genre value is rejected, so you cannot widen coverage by asking for more genres.
The cutoff differs by bucket. In the US, the lowest-ranked term in Sports scores 41, while Games and Productivity bottom out at 55. So when a term is missing from every list, the honest statement is that it scores below 55, the highest cutoff, not below 41.
65 weeks of data, and the tail still never shows up
Apple keeps 65 weeks of weekly history. We pulled all of it. For Health & Fitness in the US there were 1,265 unique terms across 65 weeks, against 500 in any one week. The extra terms scored between 47 and 66. That is churn among popular terms, not the long tail.
Niche terms such as “quit vaping” and “vape tracker” never appeared in any week. Neither did any term about ASO, SEO or keywords: they all sit at Apple's floor score of 5.
The per-keyword floor after September 2025
Apple Ads used to give a popularity score for almost any keyword you looked up. After September 2025, most keywords return the floor value instead. That source of tail data is gone for every tool, not just ours.
What this means when you pick keywords
- A popularity number for a niche keyword is a model, whatever the label says.
- Ask the tool where its number comes from. If it is built from app ratings or autocomplete, treat it as a rough guess.
- For niche terms, difficulty from the live top 10 is the number you can check yourself.
Honest ASO shows Apple's score when Apple has one, and “below 55” when it does not. You can check difficulty for free with the keyword checker.