How to tell when a competitor changed their metadata

There is no such thing as an absolute ranking in ASO. The field is contested: when a rival changes their title and rises, you fall without touching anything. Watching your own metadata and not theirs is looking at half the equation.

The good news is that every move on the rival side is publicly visible in the store. All it takes to see it is a record that remembers what yesterday looked like.

A single word changing in a rival's title reorders every ranking connected to that word. Which makes a daily record of rival text the cheapest and most explanatory history you can keep in ASO.

With the record, the question becomes simple: “what happened last Tuesday?” Without it, all you have is a falling line, and you start looking for the cause in your own changes.

Apple does not give install counts to third parties, but rating counts can be measured every day. Because the rate at which people leave ratings is relatively stable, new ratings per day move in proportion to install volume.

If a rival's daily increase rises noticeably, there is usually a version, a campaign or a metadata change underneath it. That is where to look.

The measurement needs two snapshots. It cannot be computed from a single day - and when it cannot be computed, the right behaviour is to show nothing rather than zero.

Icons and screenshots do not change as often as metadata, and when they do it is not for no reason. A rival who reshot their screenshots is working on conversion.

The point of watching this is not to copy it. Seeing the whole category move the same way is the easiest way to find where to differ.

A rival's rank for a keyword is read out of the search you already run for that keyword. In a properly built system, rival ranks cost nothing extra.

The cost is in the daily rating snapshot and the weekly review scan of every tracked app. That is also why plan limits are drawn around the number of apps.