App Store keyword research & Google Play ASO keyword ideas

An ASO keyword tool for App Store and Google Play keyword research: turn a few seed keywords, or any app — yours or a competitor's — into a list of keyword ideas, each with keyword popularity, keyword difficulty and an opportunity score. No account, no API key, no setup: enter seeds or an app ID, run, and sort by opportunity.

Built by the team behind Sonar, the ASO keyword tool for indie iOS and Android developers. It runs on the same production data the tool itself uses, and on iOS that includes Apple's own Search Popularity.

What does this ASO keyword research tool give you?

Field	What it tells you
Keyword ideas	Your seeds plus the store's own autocomplete suggestions for them — the phrases people actually type
Popularity (5–100)	How much the keyword is searched. On iOS it's Apple's own Search Popularity wherever Apple reports one
Difficulty (0–100)	How hard it is to reach the top results, from the strength of the top 10 apps
Opportunity (0–100)	Low difficulty weighted by popularity — sort by this to find keywords worth targeting
Est. downloads at #1	Rough downloads/day the #1 app gets from the keyword (iOS, real Apple popularity only)
Title matches / beatable	How many top-10 apps have the keyword in their title, and whether a top-3 slot looks winnable
Where it came from	The seed, suggestion or app each idea came from

How to find App Store and Google Play keywords for your app

1. Add seed keywords (up to 20) — words that describe your app, like meditation or sleep sounds.
2. Or add apps (up to 10) — your own app or a competitor's. The actor reads each app's name and description, removes the noise ("https", "subscription", stopwords), and uses the strongest terms as seeds. Use the App Store ID (571800810), the bundle ID or Android package name (com.calm.android), or just paste the store URL.
3. Pick the store and country — App Store, Google Play or both, in any of 72 markets.
4. Run, then sort by opportunity. High popularity with low difficulty floats to the top.

Each seed returns up to 10 ideas (the seed itself plus up to 9 suggestions). For more long-tail ideas from the same seeds, set depth 2: the actor then searches the best suggestions too, best opportunity first, until it reaches your maximum.

Use minimum popularity and maximum difficulty to keep only the keywords you'd target. Keywords outside your filters are not stored and not charged.

Use cases

• Pre-launch keyword research — find the keywords to put in your title, subtitle and keyword field before you ship
• Competitor keyword mining — enter a competitor's app ID and see which of its terms are searched and which are winnable
• Cross-store research — use your iOS app's metadata to seed Google Play research, or the other way round
• Localization — run the same seeds in another country to see which keywords carry over
• AI agents & pipelines — call it via the Apify API and get clean, typed JSON rows

Input example

{
    "seedKeywords": ["meditation", "sleep sounds"],
    "appIds": ["571800810"],
    "store": "ios",
    "country": "us",
    "maxKeywords": 50,
    "depth": 1,
    "seedsPerApp": 5,
    "minPopularity": 0,
    "maxDifficulty": 100
}

With store: "both", each store gets its own list of up to maxKeywords ideas, and app seeds are used in both stores.

Output example

One dataset row per keyword idea:

{
    "type": "keyword",
    "keyword": "meditation timer",
    "store": "ios",
    "country": "us",
    "source": "suggestion",
    "seed": "meditation",
    "appId": null,
    "appName": null,
    "popularity": 37,
    "popularitySource": "apple",
    "popularityApple": 37,
    "popularityProxy": null,
    "difficulty": 44,
    "opportunity": 15,
    "estDownloadsAt1": 170,
    "resultsCount": 200,
    "titleMatches": 6,
    "beatable": false,
    "measuredAt": "2026-10-28T01:12:49.373Z",
    "stale": false,
    "checkedAt": "2026-10-28T10:55:41.264Z"
}

Field	Meaning
source	seed = one of your keywords, app = a term from an app's metadata, suggestion = store autocomplete
seed	The search that found the keyword (the keyword itself for seeds)
appId, appName	The app whose metadata the seed came from, else null
popularity	Search popularity, 5–100
popularitySource	apple = Apple's own reading, proxy = Sonar's estimate (always the case on Google Play)
popularityApple	Apple's own reading on iOS; 5 means below Apple's threshold. null on Google Play
popularityProxy	Sonar's estimate for a keyword Apple reports as 5
difficulty	How hard it is to reach the top results, 0–100
opportunity	(100 − difficulty) × (popularity / 100)^1.3, 0–100. The exponent keeps easy keywords nobody searches from ranking first
estDownloadsAt1	Estimated downloads/day for the #1 app — a rough order of magnitude, iOS only, null without a real Apple reading
resultsCount	How many apps the store returns for the keyword
titleMatches	How many of the top 10 apps have the keyword in their title
beatable	true when a top-3 slot looks winnable
measuredAt	When the store search behind difficulty was read
stale	true when the values are 7 or more days old (they're refreshed in the background)
error	Only on keywords that couldn't be measured in this run — these rows are not charged

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	Meaning
keyword-idea	$0.02	One keyword idea with popularity, difficulty and opportunity

You pay only for the keyword ideas the run stores — no platform usage on top, so the event price is the whole bill.

Example: 2 seed keywords on the App Store at depth 1 return about 15–20 ideas, so about $0.30–0.40. The default maximum of 50 ideas per store costs at most $1.00; with store: "both", at most $2.00.

Not charged: keywords outside your filters, app-name suggestions the actor skips, duplicates, and keywords returned with an error. The run respects your maximum charge: once it's reached, the run stops and nothing beyond it is stored or charged.

Related actors

• App Store & Google Play ASO keyword rank tracker + popularity — use it once you've picked your keywords: it checks where your app and your competitors rank for each one, and on a daily schedule it builds a ranking history.
• App Store top charts & Google Play top charts scraper — use it to see which apps lead the top free, paid and grossing charts in your category, with daily movement.

FAQ

Where does the popularity score come from? From Sonar. On iOS it's Apple's own Search Popularity — the same number Apple shows advertisers — wherever Apple reports a real value. Apple reports every keyword below its lowest real reading as 5; for those keywords popularityApple is 5 and popularity is Sonar's estimate inside that hidden band, so you can still tell a long-tail keyword with some searches from one nobody types. On Google Play, popularity is Sonar's estimate from store autocomplete and the strength of the top apps.

How is this different from autocomplete scrapers? Autocomplete tells you which phrases exist. This actor adds how much each one is searched, how hard it is to rank for, and an opportunity score, so you can decide which keywords to target instead of guessing.

Why do some ideas look like app names? App Store autocomplete also suggests app titles. The actor skips the ones with title punctuation ("sleep sounds: calm rain, white noise, nature, fan") and doesn't charge for them. Turn on Include app-name suggestions to keep them.

Why did I get fewer keywords than my maximum? Each seed returns up to 10 ideas, and filters and duplicates remove some. Add more seeds, add an app, or set depth 2.

Why does a keyword come back with an error? A keyword Sonar has never measured is computed during the run. The run waits for it (up to about 3 minutes); if it still isn't ready you get a row with error set and no charge, and the next run returns its values.

Which countries are supported? Sonar's 72 keyword-research markets — the US, UK, Canada, Australia, most of Europe, Japan, Korea, India, Brazil, Mexico and more (Google Play: all except China).

How fresh is the data? Values measured in the last 7 days are returned as they are, older ones come back with stale: true and are refreshed in the background, and keywords Sonar has never seen are measured during the run.

Can I track where my app ranks for these keywords? Yes — feed the keywords you pick into the App Store & Google Play ASO keyword rank tracker and put it on a schedule. For alerts, competitor tracking and an MCP server for AI agents, see Sonar.

Can I use it from the API or an AI agent? Yes, like any Apify actor: start a run via the API and read the dataset as JSON or CSV.

Something not working? Open an issue in the Issues tab — this actor runs on our own product's data, so it's actively maintained.