Review miningSpeed and accuracy together in keyword selection
Make use of rankcusp's review mining engine and its pool of 5,000+ keywords; growing every day, the pool brings you accurate and reliable keyword suggestions.
WORKS ACROSS EVERY APP STORE CATEGORY
What a pool is, and how it differs from a list
The keyword pool is where every phrase you could measure is gathered. How wide it is sets the ceiling on what you will find.
A pool and a tracking list are not the same thing, and when they get confused both work badly.
The pool is where every phrase that could relate to your app is gathered. It needs to be wide - hundreds of rows is normal. It contains phrases nobody searches, phrases out of reach, and phrases with nothing to do with your product.
The tracking list is what comes out of the pool after a hard cut - the rows you work on weekly. It should not exceed six. A fifty-row tracking list ends with nobody touching any of the fifty.
The two are separate mental tasks. While growing the pool, do not filter: leaving a phrase out because it "looks hard" is deciding without measuring, and difficulty is not something intuition estimates.
The five channels that feed it
How wide the pool is sets the quality of what you find. There are five channels and all five need to be used.
- Your own metadataApp name, subtitle and description. The two- and three-word combinations of those words form the pool's base. Relevance is certain, but so is the risk of being trapped in your own language.
- Rival metadataThe names, subtitles and descriptions of the apps in your category. What comes out shows you positionings that did not occur to you.
- Search suggestionsThe completions returned when a word is typed into the search box. These are genuinely searched phrases, and the popularity signal comes from here.
- Category chartsApple's open category rankings. They show the category's shared language; the most valuable channel when entering a new category.
- Rival reviewsUsers' own words. The one source in no keyword tool's pool - because nobody looks there.
How each phrase is stored
Before a phrase enters the pool it is normalised: lower-cased, punctuation stripped, split into words. That step determines the pool's unique identity - it is what keeps the same phrase from appearing as two separate rows.
Normalisation depends on the country. In Turkish and Azerbaijani a capital I becomes a dotless ı; everywhere else a dotted i. Applying one rule everywhere corrupts the phrase and it matches nobody searching for it - with no error message anywhere.
In writing systems that do not separate words with spaces - Chinese, Japanese - word boundaries are not marked, so a separate boundary-finding step runs. Without it the extracted phrases are meaningless.
Phrases arriving from reviews get one more cut: anything containing a first- or second-person pronoun is dropped. People write "it really helped me"; it occurs often and nobody searches it.
Measuring the pool, and what it costs
Once the pool is wide, three measurements run, and the order matters because each has a price.
Popularity first: a relative value derived from search suggestions. Cheap, and it eliminates most of the pool immediately. Where no suggestion returns, the field stays blank - not zero.
Rank second: each remaining phrase is searched in that country and the first 200 are read. This is the expensive one, because requests per second to Apple are capped. So measurement runs per phrase rather than per row: every app tracking the same phrase is read out of one search.
Difficulty third: computed from the same search, no extra request, so it comes free.
The practical result: you can grow the pool and the rival list without fear. What raises cost is phrases multiplied by countries; not the number of rivals.
- Pool wide, tracking list narrow - six rows.
- Popularity is cheap, rank is expensive, difficulty is free.
- Adding a rival costs nothing.
- Adding a country costs more than adding a phrase; they go in one at a time.
Frequently asked
- How many phrases should the pool hold?
- There is no cap; the wider it is, the better the odds the opening is in it. What has to be capped is the tracking list you work on weekly - six rows.
- How often should I refresh it?
- Monthly is enough; categories do not move on a weekly scale. An extra scan in the months you ship is useful, because when the product changes the relevant phrases change too.
- Can I use the same pool in every country?
- No. Phrases fold by country, and the same idea is written and searched differently in different ones. Each country gets its own pool and its own list.
Search-based keywords
Keywords drawn from reviews
Keywords specific to a competitor app
Review analysis by app and by competitor
Quality first: keyword data you can trust
Before it enters the pool, every keyword is cross-checked against rankcusp's Apple Search Ads and iTunes data;
a raw review sentence never drops straight into the list.
Verified sources
Taken straight from Apple Search Ads, the iTunes Search API and the App Store review feed.
Every Keyword Counts
A pool of 5,000+ keywords, together with rank by country and competitor review data.
Daily update
The platform refreshes the keyword pool with new data every day.
Research and method team
Built-in guidance for every category and reliable data, from the hands of our method team.
Drawing keywords out of reviews
Automatic keyword matching cuts the manual work
and saves hours
Transparency about what cannot be measured
For every keyword that cannot be measured we show a plain dash, not an estimated number.
There is real data behind you
Every keyword drawn from reviews
is verified against real ranks
in Apple's sources
RUNS STRAIGHT OFF APPLE'S OWN SOURCES
App Store search rank
App Store listing and ratings
Apple review feed
Apple Search Ads popularity
App Store Connect
Google Play