App Store Optimization (ASO) Software: Find Winnable iOS Keywords, Track Country Ranks & Draft Listings with Your Own AI

How Searchbop evaluates App Store keywords without fabricated search volume

Apple never publishes raw monthly search counts (such as “14,200 searches/month”) for the App Store. When third-party ASO tools display exact monthly search numbers, those figures are synthetic extrapolations. Searchbop refuses to invent search volumes. Instead, every keyword in your iOS workspace is evaluated using three transparent, verifiable metrics:

If either Popularity or Difficulty has not been measured yet, Searchbop leaves the Opportunity cell blank rather than displaying a fake placeholder score. Built-in filters let you isolate Quick Wins (high opportunity, moderate difficulty), Striking Distance (ranks #4–#30), and Long-Tail Targets in one click.

Why Searchbop separates country popularity from worldwide suggestion scores

When you connect your Apple Ads account in Searchbop, the app generates an elliptic-curve (prime256v1 / ES256) key pair locally on your computer. You paste only the public key into your Apple Ads account settings; your private key never leaves your device. Searchbop uses the searchadsorg scope strictly to read keyword insights—it never creates campaigns, modifies bids, or touches billing.

More importantly, Searchbop exposes a technical nuance of Apple’s API that many tools hide:

• Country Insight Score (insight): Apple’s /insights/apps/search-term-popularity/query endpoint returns weekly Sunday-to-Saturday searchPopularity1to100 scores per country and genre. However, Apple only publishes roughly the top 500 search terms per genre in this report.
• Suggestion Score (suggestion): For long-tail phrases outside the top 500 list, Searchbop falls back to Apple’s /suggestions/keywords/query endpoint. In empirical testing across US, UK, Germany, and Türkiye storefronts, Apple returns a 1–100 popularity score for almost any phrase, but that suggestion score is identical across countries and sits on a different calibration scale than the country-specific insight list.

Instead of silently mixing both numbers into a single column and misleading your localization strategy, Searchbop labels the exact source (Country Insight vs. Global Suggestion) next to every popularity reading.

Researching competitor terms and tracking daily ranks across 91 countries

Adding an app takes five seconds: paste any apps.apple.com link or numeric App Store ID (trackId) and choose any of the 91 Apple Ads-supported App Store countries. You can discover keyword candidates from four distinct sources without polluting your main tracking table:

• Source 01

  Apple Related Suggestions

  Queries Apple’s keyword suggestion endpoint using your app’s adamId and seed terms to uncover related queries real users type on the App Store.

• Source 02

  Top-Ranking Competitor Title Extraction

  Splits the titles of the top-ranking apps for your existing keywords along delimiters (: - – — | , & ·) and extracts recurring 1-to-3-word phrases across competitors.

• Source 03

  Competitor Listing AI Extraction

  Fetches any competitor’s public App Store listing and uses your connected AI model to extract up to 40 target search terms in the storefront’s native language (automatically excluding the competitor’s brand name).

• Source 04

  Script & Relevance Filtering

  Because Apple’s suggestion endpoint frequently returns English or mismatched-script terms even when querying non-English storefronts (such as Japanese, Arabic, Korean, or Turkish), Searchbop validates the Unicode script (`fitsCountryScript`) and scores semantic fit from 0.0 to 1.0 so off-topic or wrong-language terms are filtered out before you add them.

Writing listings that respect Apple’s 30-char, 30-char, and 100-byte limits

When you select the target keywords you want to rank for and click Draft Listing, your connected AI model writes all six App Store Connect metadata fields while Searchbop runs deterministic validation rules in real time:

1. Title:             Max 30 characters   (Indexed by Apple — highest ranking weight)
2. Subtitle:          Max 30 characters   (Indexed by Apple — secondary ranking weight)
3. Keywords Field:    Max 100 UTF-8 BYTES (Indexed by Apple — measured in bytes, NOT characters!)
4. Promotional Text:  Max 170 characters  (Not indexed for keyword search; editable anytime)
5. Description:       Max 4,000 chars     (Not indexed by Apple search; drives conversion)
6. What's New:        Max 4,000 chars     (Version release notes; shown to returning users)

Automatic Warnings Checked Before You Push:
- Spaces after commas in Keywords ("budget, tracker") -> Wastes 100-byte budget
- Words repeated inside Keywords ("habit,daily habit") -> Wastes bytes; Apple combines words
- Overlap with Title or Subtitle -> Words already in Title/Subtitle don't need repeating
- Review Rejection Triggers -> Flags "#1", "best", "top rated", "free", "discount" in Title/Subtitle

Notice the critical technical distinction on row 3: Apple measures the hidden Keyword field in 100 UTF-8 bytes, not 100 characters. In English ASCII, 1 character equals 1 byte. In Turkish, German, French, Spanish, or Cyrillic/Arabic/CJK storefronts, accented and non-Latin characters take 2 to 3 bytes each. Searchbop measures new TextEncoder().encode(keywords).length so App Store Connect never rejects your payload on save.

Pushing drafts to an unsubmitted App Store Connect version

If you optionally connect an App Store Connect API key (.p8 private key, Key ID, and Issuer ID with the App Manager or Admin role), Searchbop can write your approved listing directly to App Store Connect:

1. Never touches your live version unexpectedly: Searchbop inspects your app’s iOS versions (`GET /v1/apps/{id}/appStoreVersions`) and looks for an editable version state (PREPARE_FOR_SUBMISSION, DEVELOPER_REJECTED, REJECTED, or METADATA_REJECTED).
2. Automatic version creation when needed: If your latest version is already READY_FOR_SALE (live on the store) and no draft version exists, Searchbop automatically increments the patch number (for example, 1.4.2 → 1.4.3) to open a clean PREPARE_FOR_SUBMISSION draft.
3. Before/after snapshot and human submission: Searchbop records a snapshot of your previous metadata before patching the localization fields (`title`, `subtitle`, `keywords`, `promotionalText`, `description`, `whatsNew`). It never attaches a binary build or submits your app to Apple Review—you stay in 100% control of the final submission inside App Store Connect.