How to Do Free ASO Keyword Research Using Apple’s Own APIs (Without a $99/Month Subscription)

01 / THE APP STORE VOLUME MYTH

Why no ASO tool on Earth has “true monthly search counts” from Apple

In web SEO, Google Keyword Planner and DataForSEO expose historical monthly search volume ranges (such as 2,400/mo). On the iOS App Store, Apple does not publish raw monthly search counts to anyone—not to indie developers, and not to $500/month enterprise intelligence suites.

Instead, Apple exposes a normalized 1 to 100 Search Popularity Index inside Apple Ads. When an expensive ASO subscription shows you an estimated “monthly searches” number, it is simply running a proprietary curve-fitting formula on top of Apple’s 1–100 popularity score. Once you understand that the underlying ground truth is Apple’s own 1–100 index plus live App Store search results, you realize you don’t need a recurring middleman subscription to see the exact same signal.

02 / TWO FREE FIRST-PARTY FEEDS

The two free Apple data sources that replace a monthly ASO subscription

A complete iOS keyword research workflow requires answering three questions for every candidate search term: How many people search for it? (Popularity), How strong are the top 10 apps already ranking for it? (Difficulty), and Where does my app rank right now? (Rank). All three come directly from Apple at zero per-call cost:

03 / STEP-BY-STEP WORKFLOW

How to find winnable App Store keywords using free Apple data

Whether you inspect the endpoints manually or run them inside Searchbop, here is the exact four-stage pipeline that turns a raw App Store URL into a ranked keyword table:

• Step 01

  Seed extraction from competitor titles and store listings

  Instead of guessing keywords in a vacuum, look at the apps already ranking in your niche. Searchbop fetches top-ranking competitors via Apple’s public Lookup and Search APIs, splits their titles along punctuation delimiters (: - – — | , & ·), and extracts 1-to-3-word n-grams that appear across multiple titles—supplemented by AI extraction from competitor descriptions.

• Step 02

  Checking Top-10 Difficulty before chasing high popularity

  A keyword with a popularity score of 75 is useless to a new indie app if the top 10 results all have 150,000+ ratings and exact-match titles. By querying the top 10 results on Apple’s public Search API, Searchbop computes a deterministic Difficulty Score (0–100) weighted 55% by logarithmic rating count (`mean(log10(1 + ratingCount)) / 6`), 30% by rank-weighted title match (`1 / position`), and 15% by average rating quality above 3.0 stars.

• Step 03

  Reading official Apple Ads Popularity (1–100)

  With a read-only Apple Ads connection, Searchbop queries the newest completed Sunday–Saturday week for your target country (`searchPopularity1to100`) and supplements long-tail terms outside Apple’s top-500 genre list with `/suggestions/keywords/query`—clearly labeling which scale each score came from.

• Step 04

  Sorting by Opportunity Score & Striking Distance

  Terms with both Popularity and Difficulty are ranked by Opportunity (`sqrt(popularity × (100 - difficulty)) × relevance`). Keywords where your app already ranks between #4 and #30 receive a 1.15× striking-distance boost, because moving a keyword from #11 to #3 by promoting it into your 30-character Subtitle delivers immediate organic impressions.

04 / TWO-YEAR COST COMPARISON

Why indie founders are switching from monthly ASO subscriptions to local BYOK tools

If you manage 1 to 15 iOS apps alongside their marketing websites, paying separate monthly subscriptions for a web SEO suite and an App Store Optimization suite compounds quickly:

Research context & search queries covered on this page Free ASO & Data · P1

Cluster & intent: aso-free-data (Commercial / Informational · P1) · Target queries: free ASO tool, free app store keyword research tool, app store keyword search volume free, aso keyword research free, how to do ASO for free.