Popularity score

Popularity says how much a term is searched in the App Store. Apple does not publish it as an absolute volume; it appears in the Search Ads interface as a relative score.

rankcusp estimates the score from the store's public endpoints. The heaviest signal is where Apple's own search suggestions return the phrase: suggestions are ordered by volume, which makes them the only direct reading of demand reachable without an ad account. This is an estimate, not Apple's own figure.

In practice anything around 5 is floor noise - terms nobody searches pile up there. rankcusp permanently drops candidates that fall below that floor, so the same dead term is not queried again every week.

A popularity that could not be measured is never shown as zero on any screen. It is shown as not measured.