Unmet needs

When you see a gap there are two roads. The long one is changing the product. The short one is saying the thing you already do and never mention - most apps' subtitles do not carry the promise their users are searching for.

Both are measurable: when you change the text, the Outcomes screen shows which keywords rose.

Complaint language produces no keywords. “It keeps crashing” is not a search term and does not enter the pool; this screen's output is a positioning idea, not a word list.

Rival tracking is usually explained by competitive instinct: "let us see what they are doing." That is the least important part of it. The real reason is that your rivals' movement is the noise in your own measurement.

You made a metadata move and a week later the phrase dropped two places. Two explanations fit: your move was wrong, or two rivals passed you that week. Without telling them apart you cannot say anything about the move - and if you say the wrong thing, you get the next move wrong too.

The same holds upward. If you repeat a move because your rank rose, you may not notice that a rival pulled its app. The gain was not yours and it will not repeat.

So the phrases you did not touch, and the apps competing with you for them, are the only source telling you what the market did that week. ASO without rival tracking is ASO without measurement.

Rival tracking is assumed to be expensive: a separate measurement, a separate request, a separate cost per rival. Set up correctly it is not.

A rank measurement works like this: a phrase is searched in a country and the first 200 results are read. Your app is in that list, and so are your rivals'. One search returns the rank of every app tracking that phrase at once.

So measurement runs per phrase, not per row. Adding a rival does not raise the cost of measurement; what raises it is phrases and countries. A method that searches once per app ties cost to the number of apps tracked, and that arithmetic does not hold at scale.

The exception is reading metadata and reviews: those need a separate request per app. That is why metadata tracking runs weekly and review mining monthly. Rank comes free; those two do not.

Your rivals' ranks are recorded daily too, and that record tells a story.

A rival that climbs sharply on a single phrase over a few days has probably added it to their metadata - most likely to the subtitle. Time to check your own and see whether you have room for that phrase.

A rival that rises across every phrase you track at once did not change metadata; strength changed - the rating count grew or the score rose. That is not a move you answer with metadata. If they fall across every phrase, it is usually a rating drop after a release - and a window of a few weeks of less resistance for you.

An app that disappears from the list entirely may have been pulled, renamed, or stopped publishing in that country. That is the cause of the sudden improvement in your ranks; do not write it down as your own.

A rival's app name, subtitle and description are public. Reading them is not for copying; it is for understanding positioning.

A rival with a generic phrase in its name is taking that phrase seriously, and competing there will be expensive. A rival whose name is only a brand is holding generic phrases in the subtitle and keyword field, which means more flexibility there. A rival whose subtitle has become a word list is optimising for indexing and giving ground on conversion - that is where a readable subtitle wins.

What you cannot see is a rival's keyword field. Apple keeps it private to the developer. Tools claiming to show it are inferring backwards from rank data; the inference is sometimes right, often incomplete, and when it is not labelled as an estimate it makes people decide wrongly.

Downloads, revenue and ad spend are closed for the same reason. The figures given for them are computed backwards from rank; a decision should not rest on them.