What Is App Store Optimization (ASO)? A Practical 2026 Guide

In short: App store optimization (ASO) is the work of getting an app found and chosen in the App Store and Google Play. Being found depends on the words in your listing (name, subtitle and keyword field on iOS; title and descriptions on Google Play) plus user signals such as downloads and ratings. Being chosen depends on your icon, screenshots, rating and reviews. Do keyword research, place the best terms in the strongest fields, test your visuals with the free first-party tools, keep quality high, and measure every change against search traffic.

Every store install starts on a store screen: a search result, a tab someone browsed, or a product page they were sent to. For almost any search, both stores show far more apps than anyone will look at. ASO decides whether yours is one of the few they look at, and whether they install it once they do. This guide explains what Apple and Google say they rank on, as of October 2026, and gives you a plan that works without paid tools.

What ASO covers

ASO has two jobs, and most mistakes come from working on only one of them.

1. Visibility: rank for searches people actually type. This is the keyword side: research, field placement, localization and the signals that move you up a results list.
2. Conversion: turn impressions into installs. This is the creative side: icon, screenshots, app previews, rating, reviews and the first lines of text people read.

The two feed each other. Apple lists downloads among the user behavior signals behind search results, so a listing that converts better also tends to rank better over time. A listing that ranks well but converts poorly wastes its impressions. Searvia's visibility score tracks the first job; your store analytics track the second.

ASO is also not the same as app marketing in general. Ads, social posts and press can send people to your product page, but they do not change how the store ranks your app for a search, except indirectly through downloads. ASO is the part you control inside the store itself.

Where your installs come from

Before you change anything, look at where installs come from today. Both stores tell you, for free.

App Store. In App Store Connect, the Acquisition section of App Analytics splits downloads by source: App Store search, App Store browse (the Today, Games and Apps tabs), app referrer, web referrer and a few others. Note that App Store search "includes views and downloads from ads that appear in App Store search results," so if you run Apple Ads, part of that number is paid.

Apple defines conversion rate as total downloads and pre-orders divided by unique device impressions. Unique device impressions count devices that saw your app on the Today, Games, Apps and Search tabs.

Google Play. Play Console's store performance reports let you break listing data down by search term, "the term that the user searched for before navigating to your Store Listing." Read the traffic source labels carefully: Google's help page describes "Google Play search" as users who searched for your app's name or a closely related brand, while "Google Play explore" includes people who searched for a category or tapped an autocomplete suggestion. Generic keyword traffic can therefore sit inside "explore," not "search."

A quick health check you can run this week:

If almost all search installs come from your brand name, you have a visibility problem: people who already know you find you, nobody else does. If impressions from search are high but conversion is low, you have a conversion problem, and new keywords will not fix it.

How the App Store ranks apps

Apple's App Store search page gives the most direct statement it has made: "Search results are based on a number of factors, including text relevance (matches for your app's title, subtitle, keywords, and primary category), as well as user behavior (downloads, ratings and reviews, and more)." It adds that ratings and reviews "can influence how your app ranks in App Store search."

These are the fields, with their limits from App Store Connect help and Apple's product page guide:

Three rules from Apple matter more than any trick:

• Don't repeat words across the name, subtitle, keyword field and category. Apple says not to repeat words already in your app name, subtitle or category. Each repeat wastes space you could give to a new term. Our App Store keywords guide shows how to fill the 100 bytes without waste.
• Stay inside guideline 2.3.7. App Review Guidelines forbid packing metadata "with trademarked terms, popular app names, pricing information, or other irrelevant phrases just to game the system," and say "Apple may modify inappropriate keywords at any time."
• Changes need a release. Name, subtitle and keywords change only with a new approved version. Plan keyword tests around your release schedule.

What Apple does not publish: the weight of each field, how words combine across fields, or how much downloads and ratings count against text. Practitioners infer these from rank tracking. The widely shared observations are that the app name outweighs the subtitle, that the subtitle outweighs the keyword field, and that single words in different fields can combine into a multi-word search. Treat them as hypotheses to test on your own app, one change per release.

How Google Play ranks apps

Google's App Discovery and Ranking page explains that Play first works out the intent of a search, then "metadata (for example, title, description, category) and other signals are used to determine which apps best address the user's query." For broad searches it may weigh app quality and how users respond to the results for that query.

The text fields are the app name (30 characters), short description (80) and full description (4,000). There is no keyword field, so every term you want to rank for must appear in text people can read. Google's Metadata policy bans keyword lists, ranking claims such as "#1," price or promotional text in the title, and emojis; our Google Play ASO guide covers the policy and a worked listing.

Google is also explicit that quality affects visibility. The Android vitals documentation says that if your app exceeds a bad behavior threshold, "Play may reduce the visibility of your title." As of October 2026 the core thresholds are a user-perceived crash rate of 1.09% and a user-perceived ANR rate of 0.47% overall, evaluated over 28 days.

The two stores side by side

Step 1: Research keywords

Everything else depends on picking the right searches. Build a list of 50 to 100 candidate terms from what your app does, what problem it solves, the words in your own and competitors' reviews, and store autocomplete. Then score each one for relevance, demand and difficulty.

Neither store publishes search volume. On the App Store, the only first-party demand signal is Apple's search popularity score from Apple Ads; our keyword research guide explains how to read it, including why so many terms now show the floor value of 5. For a quick look at one term in any country, the free App Store keyword checker shows popularity, difficulty and the current top 10 without an account.

Relevance comes first. A popular keyword whose searchers do not want your app brings impressions that never convert, and low conversion on a search is a signal you do not want to send.

Step 2: Place keywords in the strongest fields

Take Streakly, the hypothetical habit tracker we use across this blog. Its research produced "habit tracker" as the best mix of relevance and demand, then "daily routine," "goal planner," "reminder" and "streak."

On the App Store:

• Name: Streakly: Habit Tracker. Brand first, then the primary term.
• Subtitle: Daily Routine & Goal Planner. Readable, and every word is new.
• Keyword field: the remaining single words, none repeated from the name or subtitle: streak,reminder,checklist,journal,mood,...

On Google Play:

• Name: Streakly: Daily Habit Tracker
• Short description: one benefit sentence that includes "streaks," "reminders" and "daily routine."
• Full description: the primary phrase in the first sentence, then a short section per feature, each using the phrases that describe it.

The principle is the same on both stores: your single most valuable term goes in the title, the next ones go in the second most visible field, and the rest fill the remaining space, on iOS without repeats and on Google Play in natural sentences.

Step 3: Raise conversion with visuals

People decide from the search results row and the first screen of your product page. On the App Store, Apple says your rating and "up to three screenshots or app previews may display in search results depending on the platform and image orientation." That makes the first three screenshots the most important creative you have.

What tends to work, and what Apple and Google say:

• Show the app in use. Guideline 2.3.3 says screenshots "should show the app in use, and not merely the title art, login page, or splash screen." Google's best practices ask for real in-app experiences too.
• One benefit per screenshot, with a short caption that uses the words people search. Captions are not indexed for search, but a caption that echoes the query reassures the searcher that they found what they asked for.
• Make the first seconds of a preview count. Apple notes that app previews autoplay muted on the product page.
• Keep the icon simple and recognizable at small sizes; it appears in every search result.

Searvia's screenshot analysis compares your first screenshots with competitors' and writes a designer brief; the screenshots guide shows how to run it.

Step 4: Protect ratings and quality

Ratings appear next to your app in search results, influence conversion and, according to Apple, can influence ranking. Two habits matter most:

1. Ask at the right moment, with the system prompt. On iOS, the system shows Apple's prompt at most three times within a 365-day period for someone who has not rated the app, so trigger it after a success moment, never on first launch.
2. Reply to low-star reviews about bugs, fix the cause, and say so when the fix ships. Our reviews guide covers the rules on both stores.

On Google Play, watch Android vitals weekly. A crash spike that crosses the bad behavior threshold can cost visibility no matter how good the listing is.

Step 5: Test and segment with first-party tools

Both stores give you free A/B testing and segmented listings. Most apps leave them unused.

App Store product page optimization. Test up to three treatments of your icon, screenshots and app previews against your original page, with a traffic share you choose. A test runs up to 90 days, you can run one at a time, and Apple recommends waiting until a treatment performs better or worse than the baseline with at least 90% confidence. Alternate icons must be included in your app binary; tests without icon changes can be submitted for review independent of a new version.

Google Play store listing experiments. Experiments test graphics in your default language or graphics and descriptions in up to five languages, with up to two variants against your current listing.

Custom product pages (App Store). You can create up to 70 custom product pages with their own screenshots, previews and promotional text. Assign keywords from your keyword field and a page can appear in search results for those keywords instead of your default page. Searvia's custom product pages guide shows how to plan pages by search intent.

Custom store listings (Google Play). You can create up to 50 custom store listings targeted by country, by inactive users, by a unique URL or by search keywords.

Step 6: Use events and featuring

In-App Events are timely events inside your app, such as a challenge or a new season, that get their own cards on the store. Apple allows up to 10 published events at a time, each lasting up to 31 days and promoted up to 14 days before it starts. Events appear on your product page, in search results and in editorial selections; in search, people who have downloaded your app before see the event card, while new users still see your screenshots. Searvia's in-app events guide covers writing event copy within Apple's limits.

Featuring. Apple's editors take nominations through App Store Connect. Apple asks for at least two weeks' notice and recommends nominating up to three months in advance for wider consideration. Its list of what editors consider ends with your product page: "compelling screenshots, app previews, and descriptions, as well as positive ratings and reviews."

Step 7: Measure every change

ASO only improves if you can tell which changes worked. The method we use:

1. Write down the date of every listing change, including competitors' changes you notice.
2. Track ranks daily for every keyword you target, plus a few you do not, as a control.
3. Compare the week before a change with the second week after it. The first week after a release is noisy while ranks settle.
4. Read conversion from the search source only, not overall conversion, which mixes in browse and referral traffic.

A worked example with hypothetical numbers. Streakly's App Store search source shows 40,000 unique impressions and 1,600 downloads in the week before a new subtitle: a 4.0% conversion rate. In the second week after the release it shows 46,000 impressions and 1,750 downloads: about 3.8%. Impressions rose 15%, so the new subtitle helped visibility, but conversion dipped slightly. Total search downloads still rose by 150 a week, so the change is worth keeping, and the next test should target conversion, for example a new first screenshot that matches the new subtitle.

A 90-day ASO plan

Common ASO myths

ASO checklist

1. Know your source split and search conversion rate.
2. Track 30 or more keywords daily, including your brand.
3. Primary keyword in the title, next terms in the subtitle or short description.
4. iOS keyword field packed to 100 bytes with no repeats or plurals of words you already use.
5. Google Play descriptions that read naturally and contain no keyword lists.
6. First three screenshots show the app in use, one benefit each.
7. Rating prompt after success moments; replies to low-star bug reviews.
8. Crash and ANR rates under Google's thresholds.
9. One creative test running at all times.
10. Custom product pages or custom store listings for your main search intents.
11. Localized metadata for your top markets.
12. A dated log of every change, with the before and after numbers.

How Searvia helps

Searvia tracks your App Store and Google Play ranks next to your competitors (daily on paid plans, weekly on the free plan), shows Apple's official popularity when you connect Apple Ads, flags your golden keywords, packs the iOS keyword field and publishes metadata changes to App Store Connect and Google Play. Its store changes tab logs every change to your and your competitors' listings and labels whether yours helped or hurt. You can start with the free App Store and Google Play rank checker or see the plans on the pricing page, including a free plan.