Should I Put Spaces After Commas, Plurals, or Title Words in App Store Connect Keywords?

Why `word1, word2` wastes bytes—and why `word1,word2` beats `word1 word2`

In App Store Connect, the comma (,) is the official token delimiter. When developers type a space after each comma out of habit (`budget, planner, expense, tracker, bill, reminder`), those five spaces consume 5 UTF-8 bytes—enough room for an entire extra keyword like `quote` or `audit`.

What about spaces inside a two-word phrase, such as `expense tracker`? Because Apple’s search engine automatically forms multi-word combinations across comma-separated tokens in your Keyword field, writing expense,tracker (with a comma and no space) is strictly superior to writing expense tracker (with a space): both consume 15 bytes, and separating every single word with a comma ensures unambiguous tokenization.

Does repeating a word in Title, Subtitle, AND Keywords make it rank higher?

No. This is one of the most persistent myths from early-2010s web SEO. On the iOS App Store, a word receives the ranking weight of the highest-weighted field in which it appears:

Searchbop’s [`listingIssues()`](file:///Users/tarik/Desktop/TengrX-SEO/packages/core/src/aso/rules.ts#L30-L55) check automatically flags both internal Keyword repetitions (`Repeated words waste space: ...`) and Title/Subtitle overlaps (`Already in the title or subtitle: ...`) so you never accidentally duplicate a token.

Do you need both `invoice` and `invoices`?

In English storefronts (`en-US`, `en-GB`, `en-CA`, `en-AU`), Apple’s morphological stemmer automatically matches regular singular and plural nouns (`habit` matches `habits`, `flashcard` matches `flashcards`). You only need to include the shorter singular form.

However, keep two exceptions in mind:

• Irregular English plurals: Words that change their root spelling (such as `child` / `children` or `tooth` / `teeth`) are safer when tested explicitly via Apple’s public Search API (`itunes.apple.com/search`).
• Agglutinative and inflected languages (Turkish, German, Russian, Arabic): Outside English, Apple’s morphological stemming is much weaker. For example, in Turkish (`tr`), suffix variations (`bütçe` vs. `bütçem` or `takip` vs. `takibi`) can produce noticeably different top-10 search results. Always check both forms in Searchbop’s difficulty and rank table for your target country.

Words you should never type into your 100-byte Keyword field

• Stop words and connectors: `the`, `a`, `an`, `and`, `or`, `for`, `with`, `to`, `in`, `app`, `ios`, `iphone`, `ipad`.
• Your primary category name: If your app’s primary category is `Finance` or `Productivity`, Apple already associates that category with your listing.
• Competitor brand names or trademarks: Including another company’s trademarked app name inside your hidden 100-byte Keyword field violates App Store Review Guideline 2.3.7 and 4.1, and is a common cause of `METADATA_REJECTED`.

Reclaiming 36 bytes of wasted space in 30 seconds

BEFORE (99/100 bytes — only 6 unique new concepts indexed!):
pomodoro, timer, study, focus, productivity app, work tracker, adhd timer, habit, habits, routine, clock
- Wastes: "pomodoro", "timer", "study", "focus", "work", "tracker" (already in Title/Subtitle)
- Wastes: "app", "habits" (plural duplicate), and 10 spaces after commas!

AFTER (99/100 bytes — 15 unique high-intent concepts indexed!):
adhd,habit,routine,clock,countdown,interval,tomato,blocker, distraction,student,exam,homework,deep,task,goal
(Note: remove the single space before "distraction" -> 98/100 bytes, 0 warnings)