Keyword rank explained

Open the Tracking tab in Keywords & ASO and you'll see a Rank column for each keyword. This page explains what those numbers represent, where they come from, and how to interpret them.

What rank means here

For a given keyword + country pair:

Your app's position in the App Store search results list when someone types that keyword.

Rank 1 means your app is first. Rank 47 means 46 apps appear above you. "Not in top 250" means we scanned the full result set and couldn't find you.

Rank is always per-country. photo editor in the US store and photo editor in Germany are different result lists, so they're tracked separately.

Where the data comes from

MySigner polls Apple's public App Store search endpoint — the same one the native App Store app uses. For each keyword + country we run the search and note where your bundle ID appears in the results.

• It's not manual ranking. Positions are whatever Apple's algorithm returns at query time.
• It's undocumented. Apple doesn't publish the endpoint shape. Occasional format shifts cause a refresh to fail — those show as — for a day.
• It's organic, not paid. Rank doesn't use the Search Ads API.

"Not in top 250"

Apple's search endpoint returns up to ~228 results per query (the exact cap varies slightly by country). If you're not in that first slice, we can't see your actual rank — it could be 229, it could be 10,000. The UI shows "Not in top 250" instead of faking a big number.

What to do:

1. Check relevance. If the keyword is already in your 100-character string, name, or subtitle and you're still outside the top 250, it's too competitive for your current metadata.
2. Work the long tail. Rather than calendar, try shared family calendar — easier to rank, more qualified users.
3. Revisit in 7 days. Apple's index takes a few days to settle after a push.

Non-personalized results

Real App Store search is personalized — Apple ranks partly on the user's download history, country, language, and device type. Two people in the same country at the same moment can see different lists.

MySigner queries from a neutral context: no history, no personalized signals. What you see is a non-personalized proxy — the ranking Apple would show a fresh device with no prior downloads in that country. This is what every ASO tool does, and it's the right signal for the discovery question: "how visible am I to someone who doesn't already know me?" Existing users will often see you rank higher than the tracker shows. Treat rank as trend data, not ground truth.

Refresh cadence

Refreshes run overnight in your organisation's timezone. The Date checked column shows the last successful refresh. A manual refresh per keyword is available from its row menu — useful right after a push. Manual refreshes are rate-limited so they queue rather than fire in parallel.

Why ranks oscillate ±3 positions

Even with perfectly stable metadata, you'll see daily ±3 swings. Sources: Apple re-weighting its index; competing apps pushing new metadata or running ASA campaigns; user behaviour in your country (download velocity, retention, ratings) feeding back into rank; sampling noise between two queries of the same endpoint.

Don't react to a single day's 2-position drop. Use a 7-day moving average before concluding a change is real.

What to track instead of daily rank

The useful signal is trend, not absolute position:

Open the history chart behind each keyword in Tracking to see the 30-day sparkline and push markers — that's where the insight lives.

Related

• Keywords & ASO - The ASO workspace overview
• Keyword popularity - The 1-to-5 dot scale, separate from rank
• Connect Apple Search Ads - Required for popularity but not for rank
• Analytics - Correlate rank changes with impressions and downloads