Why Apple Search Ads 'Popularity' Is No Longer Reliable for ASO Keyword Research (and What RespectASO Does Instead)

In October 2025, the number of U.S. App Store keywords with an Apple Search Ads popularity score above 5 dropped by 77% in four days. MobileAction, APPlyzer, Appfigures, Astro, Phiture and Radaso all confirmed it. Here is why the metric most ASO tools are built on quietly stopped working — and what RespectASO uses instead.

Should an App Store Optimization tool rely on Apple Search Ads "popularity" to estimate how often users search a keyword? Our answer in RespectASO is no — and as the evidence below shows, most serious ASO platforms have quietly arrived at the same conclusion. In October 2025 the metric publicly broke. The deeper truth is that it was always the wrong tool for the job: a relative paid-bidding score that the industry retrofitted into an organic keyword research foundation. This post lays out exactly what happened, what Apple's own documentation actually says, what serious vendors are doing about it, and what RespectASO does instead.

What Apple Search Ads "popularity" actually is

Apple's only public, human-readable definition of the metric is two sentences. The Apple Ads help glossary states: "Search popularity is displayed as numbers from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most popular" (ads.apple.com). The 5-to-100 numeric scale that ASO tools display in dashboards is not a documented Apple surface — it is the underlying integer returned by the Apple Ads Campaign Management API. Apple itself only ever describes the metric as a 1-to-5 dot indicator.

Crucially, every Apple reference to Search Popularity sits inside paid Apple Ads documentation — Reporting, Recommendations, Glossary — and is presented next to bidding inputs like recommended max cost-per-tap (ads.apple.com). Apple's own developer page on App Store search lists the organic ranking factors and never mentions ASA popularity at all: "Search results are based on a number of factors, including text relevance (matches for your app's title, subtitle, keywords, and primary category), as well as user behavior (downloads, ratings and reviews, and more)" (developer.apple.com).

AppFollow, whose own popularity score is a direct passthrough of Apple's, puts the structural caveat plainly: "The Popularity Score is a relative metric. There is no data on the particular number of search requests for a keyword with a specific Popularity Score… The ratio between scores is not linear because Popularity grows exponentially" (support.appfollow.io).

Three things follow from Apple's own framing:

  • Search popularity is a relative index, not a search volume.
  • It exists to support paid bidding, not organic keyword popularity planning.
  • Apple has no public methodology, no changelog, and no obligation to keep it stable for third-party ASO platforms.

The October 2025 collapse: what happened, and which tools said so

On September 29, 2025, the metric publicly broke. ASO.dev measured the number of U.S. App Store keywords with popularity above 5 falling from 165,875 to 39,254 in four days — a 77.4% drop — with most keywords previously scoring 20–60 now pinned at the floor value of "5" (aso.dev). ASO.dev verified the values came directly from Apple's API: "After verifying data directly from the Apple Search Ads API, we confirmed this is not an ASO.dev issue."

Within weeks, the rest of the industry corroborated the same pattern.

"This issue does not only affect MobileAction, but also all ASO tools in the market that derive their data from Apple Ads."
— Bora Sipahi, MobileAction, October 16, 2025 (mobileaction.co)

"Since early October, the Apple Ads API has been showing a popularity score of '5' — the lowest possible value — for thousands of keywords that previously had much higher scores… This isn't a bug in your favorite ASO tool — it's happening everywhere, across all platforms and markets."
— APPlyzer, October 2025 (applyzer.com)

"A few weeks ago we noticed the popularity score for many keywords dropped to 5… we believe this is an issue and not a real drop. However, in the meantime, our team was able to identify another way to collect popularity scores that are more accurate."
— Appfigures release notes, October 2025 (news.appfigures.com)

"Industry discussions indicate this was triggered by an Apple Search Ads backend change, where Apple stopped displaying search scores below 50."
— Talha Mumtaz, Phiture, ASO Monthly 113, October 20, 2025 (phiture.com)

"Massive drop in popularity in Apple Ads… This issue does not only affect Astro, but all ASO tools on the market that extract their data from Apple Ads."
— Matteo Spada, founder of Astro, October 8, 2025 (x.com)

"In October 2025, Apple updated how this information is displayed… third-party tools lost access to detailed SAP values, no longer providing a complete view of term popularity."
— Radaso (radaso.com)

Apple has issued no public acknowledgement. There is no Apple Developer news post, no Apple Ads changelog entry, and no ads.apple.com help update addressing the collapse. Apple did quietly launch a beta Monthly Search Term Rank Report inside Apple Ads Insights — but the new report uses a different, non-comparable 1–100 monthly methodology and only surfaces keywords with the legacy popularity score of 35 or higher (applyzer.com). In other words, Apple's own replacement signal hides the long tail that indie developers depend on most.

This was not a one-off. Radaso documented the same flooring pattern back in June 2024: "Apple seems to be providing app-relevant SAP data instead of global SAP data. Keywords apparently deemed irrelevant to a specific app are now being assigned a default SAP value of 5… Apple has not made an official announcement" (swipeinsight.app). The 2025 event was the same behavior, only larger.

Why ASA popularity is structurally weak — even when it is "working"

The collapse is the visible symptom. The structural problems were always there.

  • It is a relative index, not search volume. Apple has never published per-keyword search counts. AppFollow's own glossary frames the metric as "a comparative index. Treat it as a demand signal, then validate with your impressions and install data" (appfollow.io).
  • It was designed for ad bidding. Apple's "Keywords – Best Practices" page presents popularity exclusively in a paid context: "By choosing relevant and popular keywords, you can reach these customers at the moment they're searching for apps" (ads.apple.com).
  • It has significant access friction. Reaching it programmatically requires an Apple Ads account, an Account Admin–generated API user, OAuth 2 credentials, App Store Connect role gating, tax info, and a payment method (ads.apple.com; ads.apple.com). Tools that scrape the Apple Ads dashboard rely on session cookies that break under 2FA.
  • It is region-limited. Apple Search Ads runs in 91 markets after the December 2024 expansion — but the App Store has 175 storefronts. Roughly half the App Store has no popularity data at all (searchadsmaven.com; ppc.land).
  • There is no published methodology. Phiture and SplitMetrics had to derive the popularity-to-impressions relationship empirically because Apple has never published it (splitmetrics.com).
  • No changelog when it changes. The September 2025 collapse, the June 2024 SAP-logic shift, and the March 2026 custom-reports endpoint returning 403 Forbidden were all discovered by developers in production, not announced by Apple (developer.apple.com).
  • It is noisy at the floor. Punctuation, mixed-language keywords and brand terms with special characters routinely get pinned to the minimum value, even when relevant (radaso.com; swipeinsight.app).

What serious ASO platforms actually do

The vendor landscape, summarised honestly from each vendor's own public methodology pages, falls into three broad camps. None of this is meant as criticism of any tool — it is simply what each company tells the world it does.

Direct ASA passthrough for iOS. AppTweak says its iOS volume score is "directly fetched from Apple's Search Popularity metric" (apptweak.com). App Radar: "we pull keyword popularity values directly from Apple" (appradar.com). AppFollow: "The Apple Search Ads score and our Popularity Score are the same values" (support.appfollow.io). MobileAction publicly froze popularity updates during the collapse and told users to "stay with the current ASO decisions or strategy until the problem is resolved" (mobileaction.co). Appfigures' founder Ariel Michaeli has also publicly described Apple Ads as the source of their popularity metric (appfigures.com).

ASA as one input among several. Phiture's canonical methodology piece is unusually candid: "To date there is no equivalent to the Google Keyword Planner tool that shows average monthly searches… As a second best proxy, one can use either 'Priority' returned by the iTunes API, Search Popularity Scores for Search Ads (ranging from 5–100) or other Search volume scores as predicted by any of the ASO tools" (phiture.com). ASOdesk describes its surface as "the popularity of a search query based on our Traffic Score algorithm, as well as the Apple Search Ads Popularity Index" (asodesk.com) — ASA as one signal, not the only one.

Independent or proprietary models. APPlyzer was the most explicit during the collapse: "APPlyzer uses its own independent and dynamic model to calculate search scores. It doesn't rely on Apple's API values, which means your data stays stable and accurate — even when Apple's doesn't" (applyzer.com). Gummicube markets DATACUBE on the basis of "real mobile data, not web data" (gummicube.com). Sensor Tower's "Traffic Score" is described as proprietary and informed by a panel of more than 10 million consumers (sensortower.com; sensortower.com).

Across the three camps, the picture is consistent: tools whose iOS popularity number is essentially Apple's own ASA value were the most exposed by the 2025 collapse, and the vendors with the loudest public statements about it have been the ones building their way around the dependency.

What RespectASO does instead

RespectASO never connected to Apple Search Ads. The public open-source repository at github.com/respectlytics/respectaso states it plainly in the README: "RespectASO uses the iTunes Search API as its only data source — no Apple Search Ads credentials, no scraping, no paid APIs."

Instead of asking Apple's ad system how popular a keyword is, RespectASO looks at what is actually visible in the App Store for that keyword and reasons about it from observable signals. Six high-level signals are blended into a single popularity estimate:

  • Result count — how many apps Apple actually returns for the search.
  • Leader strength — how strong the top-ranking apps are, by rating volume.
  • Title-match density — how many top apps target the keyword in their title.
  • Market depth — whether strong apps appear deep in the results, not just at the top.
  • Specificity penalty — adjustment for generic terms that inflate result counts.
  • Exact-phrase bonus — reward for clean multi-phrase matches.

The same applies to keyword difficulty, which RespectASO computes from a separate set of factors covering rating volume, dominant players, rating quality, market maturity, publisher diversity, app count, and content relevance. The full methodology is documented in the in-app methodology page and in the open scoring code at aso/scoring.py and aso/services.py.

For an indie developer, this approach has practical consequences:

  • No Apple Search Ads account, no Account Admin role, no OAuth, no 2FA cookie session. The tool runs against the public iTunes Search API.
  • No requirement to have a primary app in ASA. You can research a market before you have ever shipped.
  • 30 App Store storefronts — including markets ASA does not serve at all, configurable from aso/forms.py.
  • Open methodology. Every signal and every weight is in the public repo. You can read it, audit it, fork it, or argue with it.
  • Stability. When Apple's ad backend silently shifts — as it did in June 2024, September 2025, and March 2026 — your keyword research data does not silently shift with it.

What our number is — and what it is not

This is the most important section, so it gets the plainest language we can give it.

RespectASO does not claim to know exact Apple search volumes. Nobody outside Apple does. Apple has never published per-keyword search counts to developers. Apple Search Ads popularity is also not exact — it is a relative index that Apple itself has only ever defined as a 1-to-5 dot scale. Sensor Tower's Traffic Score, AppTweak's Volume score, and APPlyzer's independent model are all estimates too. The honest framing is that the entire ASO industry is estimating, not measuring.

What RespectASO offers is a different kind of estimate: one calculated from publicly observable App Store signals, with the inputs and weights documented in open-source code. You can verify how every score was produced. You can compare it against your own App Store Connect search-term impressions over time, which Gummicube's Dave Bell rightly calls "the only way to understand total impressions from organic, and how many users tap 'GET' from the store" (mobilemarketingmagazine.com). And you can do all of that without your competitive research being routed through anyone else's backend.

What this means for indie iOS developers

A few practical takeaways from the evidence above:

  1. Treat any single popularity number as an estimate, not a measurement. The vendors who are most candid about this — AppFollow, Phiture — have been saying so for years.
  2. Prefer tools that publish their methodology. A score you cannot inspect is a score you cannot defend in your own roadmap meetings.
  3. Validate the long tail with App Store Connect. Apple's own organic acquisition data is the closest thing to ground truth. Apple's docs are explicit that the Sources view in App Analytics breaks downloads into App Store Search, App Store Browse, App Referrers and Web Referrers (developer.apple.com).
  4. Be cautious about tools whose iOS popularity number is silently a passthrough of Apple Search Ads. Not because the vendors are doing anything wrong — most disclose it on their own help pages — but because their data quality is now coupled to Apple's ad backend in ways neither you nor they control.
  5. Storefront coverage matters. If you sell in markets outside the 91 ASA countries, ASA-derived popularity simply does not exist for those storefronts.

Conclusion

The thesis is narrower and stronger than "Apple Search Ads popularity is bad." It is this: ASA popularity is a paid-auction artifact that the ASO industry retrofitted into an organic foundation, and Apple has spent 2024 through 2026 demonstrating exactly why that retrofit was always brittle. RespectASO chose a different foundation from day one — public App Store signals, open methodology, no Apple Ads dependency — because that is the only kind of foundation an indie developer can actually rely on without permission from Apple's ad team.

If you would like to see the model for yourself, the scoring code is open at github.com/respectlytics/respectaso, the in-app methodology page walks through every signal in plain English, and you can explore RespectASO on your own Mac without an Apple Ads account, an API key, or a third-party server in the loop.

Sources

Apple official documentation

Vendor reports on the 2025 ASA popularity collapse

Vendor methodology pages

Industry context

  • Search Ads Maven — Apple Search Ads expansion to 91 markets: searchadsmaven.com
  • PPC Land — Apple App Store search ads: ppc.land

Open-source code