How to See What Keywords a Competitor App Uses on the App Store (Without $199/Month Spy Tools)

What Apple’s public `itunes.apple.com/lookup` endpoint actually returns

When you pass any competitor’s App Store URL or numeric ID to `https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=COMPETITOR_ID&country=us`, Apple’s server returns a public JSON payload containing `trackName` (Title), `primaryGenreName` (Category), `description` (up to 4,000 chars), `releaseNotes` (What’s New), `userRatingCount`, and `averageUserRating`.

Notice what is missing: the private `keywords` field (100 bytes) is never included in public `lookup` responses. When a $199/month enterprise ASO tool claims to show you “Competitor X’s keywords,” it is not reading a secret Apple endpoint—it is running candidate queries through `itunes.apple.com/search` and recording which queries return Competitor X in the top 200 results.

Why competitor App Titles reveal their #1 priority keywords

Because the 30-character App Title carries the heaviest ranking weight on the App Store, every serious competitor puts their highest-converting search phrase directly in their Title after a colon or dash (`Brand: Keyword Phrase`). In Searchbop, [`extractTitleTerms()`](file:///Users/tarik/Desktop/TengrX-SEO/packages/core/src/aso/score.ts#L62-L76) splits the titles of the apps ranking for your current keywords along punctuation boundaries and extracts recurring 1-word, 2-word, and 3-word phrases:

export function extractTitleTerms(titles: string[], lang: string): string[] {
  const counts = new Map<string, number>();
  for (const title of titles) {
    for (const part of title.split(/[:\-–—|,&·•()/+]+/)) {
      const words = normalizeTerm(part, lang).split(" ").filter((w) => /\p{L}/u.test(w));
      for (let size = 1; size <= 3; size++) {
        for (let i = 0; i + size <= words.length; i++) {
          const phrase = words.slice(i, i + size).join(" ");
          if (phrase.length >= 3) counts.set(phrase, (counts.get(phrase) ?? 0) + 1);
        }
      }
    }
  }
  // Sorted by frequency across top-ranking competitor titles
  return [...counts.entries()].sort((a, b) => b[1] - a[1]).map(([term]) => term);
}

Extracting 40 target keywords from any competitor App Store URL

Even though Apple doesn’t index the 4,000-character Description for search, developers almost always use the exact same domain nouns and feature phrases in their Description that they placed into their hidden 100-byte Keyword field.

In Searchbop, you can paste any competitor’s App Store URL (or `trackId`) into the Competitor Extraction input. Searchbop’s [`aiTermsFromListing()`](file:///Users/tarik/Desktop/TengrX-SEO/packages/core/src/aso/research.ts#L82-L88) fetches the competitor’s live storefront listing for your chosen country and instructs your connected AI model to extract up to 40 1-to-3-word search terms in that storefront’s native language (automatically stripping out the competitor’s own brand name).

Testing which extracted competitor keywords are actually worth targeting

Once Searchbop extracts candidate phrases from a competitor’s listing or top-10 titles, it doesn’t blindly dump all 40 phrases into your tracking database. Instead:

1. It checks **Apple Ads Country Popularity (`searchPopularity1to100`)** for those candidate phrases in your target country so you can see which terms have real search demand.
2. It scores **AI Semantic Relevance (`0.0–1.0`)** against your app’s actual feature set so you don’t waste metadata space targeting a feature only the competitor has.
3. When you select the winning terms to add to your table, Searchbop queries `itunes.apple.com/search` to compute **Top-10 Difficulty** and check where your app currently ranks (`#1–#200`).