RespectASO Now Runs on Apple's Official Ads API - What the Apple Ads Platform API v1 Means for ASO

In August 2026 Apple released the Apple Ads Platform API v1 - the official, documented successor to the Campaign Management API, and the first time Apple has ever published search-popularity data through a supported interface. RespectASO's Apple popularity source now runs entirely on it. This post explains what the new API actually is (including what it can and cannot do), how we integrated it, what changed in your scores, and the honest pros and cons - because if you use any ASO tool that shows "Apple's popularity", this API changes what that claim can mean.

What the Apple Ads Platform API v1 is

The Apple Ads Platform API v1 is Apple's new advertising API, replacing the Campaign Management API v5 (which Apple retires on January 26, 2027). Most of it concerns campaign management, but two endpoints matter enormously for ASO, because they are the first official sources of search data Apple has ever offered:

• Search term popularity - Apple's ranking of the most-searched terms on the App Store, per storefront and per week: up to 500 terms in each of Apple's 15 categories, each with a market-wide popularity value on a 1-100 scale, a within-category popularity value, a category rank, and the familiar 1-5 popularity tier.
• Impression share - for advertisers: how often your own ads appeared for the search terms Apple reports for your apps.

Two properties of the popularity endpoint define everything a tool can honestly build on it:

It is a dataset, not a lookup. You cannot ask Apple "how popular is my keyword?" - there is no search-term filter. Apple hands you its top terms per category, and that's it. We evaluated the entire v1 surface looking for a per-keyword route, including the keyword-suggestion endpoints, and none provides a usable lookup: the suggestion scores are advertiser-scoped plumbing with no storefront attribution. Any tool showing granular Apple values for arbitrary keywords is still reading Apple's unofficial internal interfaces - the same ones that broke publicly in October 2025.

It is weekly, with history. Apple publishes each completed week every Monday and keeps roughly 65 weeks of history. Not real-time - but stable, documented, and deep enough for real trend analysis.

How RespectASO integrated it

The dataset shape inverts how an integration has to work, and we leaned into that instead of fighting it. Rather than asking Apple about each keyword, RespectASO syncs the full dataset for each storefront you work in - once a week, automatically - and then every popularity lookup is a local table read. After the sync, scoring never waits on Apple. Scans and analyses got faster, not slower.

• One-time, five-minute setup. RespectASO generates a key pair on your Mac; you paste the public key into your Apple Ads account settings once and copy three IDs back. A free Apple Ads account is enough - no campaigns, no spend, no payment method. The private key never leaves your machine.
• Works in every edition. The old integration needed an embedded sign-in window and only worked in the native Mac app. The official API is a headless key exchange, so the Apple source now works identically in the desktop app, the browser edition, and Docker.
• Fully automatic. Each new week is picked up by the background sync as soon as Apple publishes it, and missed weeks are caught up on launch. There is nothing to click.
• Defensive by design. A downloaded week only starts serving after sanity checks pass; if Apple ever ships an incomplete week, the previous good week keeps serving and the sync retries later. Apple's data problems never become your data problems.

What changed in your scores

The precise claim, stated carefully: RespectASO now shows Apple's official values for every keyword Apple reports - its top search terms, roughly the 500-plus-weekly-searches tier of each category - and a definitive below-the-bar signal for everything else. A keyword absent from the dataset isn't a data gap; it is Apple telling you the keyword ranks below every reported term of its category. RespectASO treats that as information: the keyword scores from the built-in estimate, capped just below the least-reported value of its own category, and labeled EST* with the full explanation one hover away.

The dataset also did something for the estimate itself that nothing else could: it gave us ground truth. The RespectASO estimate's signal weights are now fitted against hundreds of official Apple values plus keywords provably outside Apple's top terms - so the estimate speaks Apple's 1-100 scale, and on held-out validation it ranks keywords with a 0.61 correlation to Apple's own ordering (0.71 on brand-like keywords), up from 0.37 and 0.09 for the previous hand-tuned weights. Apple's reporting bar even gave download estimates their first hard calibration point. The full details are on the methodology page, as always.

And because the dataset is a genuinely interesting object in its own right, RespectASO Pro gained a Top Search Terms tab: browse what people actually search per storefront and category, watch the weekly climbers, fallers, and brand-new terms, follow any term's week-by-week history, and track it or hand it to the AI Researcher in one click.

The honest pros and cons

What the official API gets you

• Official and documented. A supported contract with a changelog, instead of an internal endpoint that can vanish or change silently. This is the difference between building on rock and building on driftwood.
• Per-storefront truth. Every value is attributed to a specific storefront - Japanese terms for Japan, Arabic terms for Saudi Arabia. That attribution is exactly what the unofficial suggestion routes lack.
• Richer than a single number. Category, rank within category, market-wide and within-category values, the 1-5 tier, and week-over-week movement - enough to see not just how popular a term is, but where it sits in its market and where it's heading.
• Free and private. No spend required, and requests run with your own credentials from your own machine. Your keyword list is never routed through anyone's server, including ours.

What it doesn't do - and what that means

• No per-keyword lookup. Long-tail keywords - a large share of real ASO work - have no official Apple value. Every tool faces this; the difference is whether the tool tells you. RespectASO covers those keywords with its calibrated estimate and labels every single value with its source.
• Weekly, not live. Within-week values are stable in practice, and the estimate remains the real-time source - but if you expect this morning's spike in Apple's numbers, this API is not that.
• Top-of-market coverage. Up to 500 terms per category is the head of the market, by definition. Absence proves "below the category's reported terms", not "zero interest".
• An account and a key. The one-time setup is genuinely quick, but it is a step - which is why the built-in estimate remains a first-class source that works with zero setup, and why you choose which source powers your scores.

What to ask any ASO tool now

The Apple Ads Platform API draws a bright line through the industry: for the first time, there is an official way to show Apple's search popularity - and it only answers for the top terms. So when a tool shows you an "Apple popularity" value for an arbitrary long-tail keyword, there are only two possibilities: it comes from an unofficial interface, or it isn't Apple's number. Neither is disqualifying - but you deserve to know which one you're looking at. Ask. And if the answer is vague, that's an answer too.

RespectASO's position hasn't changed since we first wrote about Apple's popularity metric: no single unlabeled source should ever silently power your decisions. The official API made that position easier to hold than ever - official values where Apple speaks, a calibrated and inspectable estimate where it doesn't, every number labeled, and you choosing the source.

Download RespectASO to try the estimate free, or see RespectASO Pro for the Top Search Terms browser, the AI workflows, and MCP integration.