Does Apple publish App Store search volume?

No. Apple publishes a popularity score from 1 to 100, not a count of searches. It comes from Apple Search Ads and from the official lists of top 500 searches per country and category.

What does a popularity of 5 mean in Apple Search Ads?

It is the floor. Searches under the cut-off all show 5. Well-known searches such as météo, ricette and tłumacz sat on it in our test, so 5 means no data, not no demand.

Is a popularity score the number of searches?

No. It is an index built from rank. 60 versus 57 does not mean 5% more searches. It orders searches, it does not count people.

What if my search is not in the official top 500?

It is below the cut-off, around 45 on the 1 to 100 scale. That is "no official reading", not "no searches". Check the live results and the number of apps competing instead.

How to see App Store keyword search volume

Updated 14 November 2026

Apple does not publish how many people search a keyword. It publishes a popularity score from 1 to 100, in two places: Apple Search Ads, and Apple's official lists of the top 500 searches per country and category. Search Ads has a floor of 5 that hides real demand: a prayer-times search in Kazakhstan showed 5 there and 72 (#34 in the country) in the official list. Use the official list first.

What Apple gives you

No search counts. Apple gives a score from 1 to 100 that is built from the rank of a search, not from traffic. A 60 beats a 57, but it is not "5% more searches". Treat it as an order, not as a number of people.

Source	What it shows	Where it fails
Apple Search Ads popularity	A score per keyword, any keyword you type	Floor of 5. Everything below the cut-off shows 5
Apple official top-500 lists	Top 500 searches per country and category, popularity 1 to 100, rank in the category	Only 500 per country and category. Not in the list means below the cut-off, not zero
Autocomplete	Suggestions, in order	A draft list of what people type. No volume at all
Third-party "volume" numbers	Estimates built on the above	Not Apple data. Check any number against the official list

The floor of 5 hides real demand

We tested the Search Ads score on words everyone knows are searched all day: météo in France, ricette in Italy, tłumacz in Poland. All three sat on the floor at 5. A score of 5 on a non-English word means no data, not no demand. A score above 5 does prove demand.

The cause is a change on Apple's side in October 2025. Several ASO tools reported that US keywords scoring above 5 fell from 165,875 to 39,254 in a few days, a drop of 77.4%. The band that fell to the floor was 20 to 60, the mid-tail where small apps win. Apple has not called it a bug.

One search, two answers

A prayer-times search in Kazakhstan read 5 in Search Ads. Apple's official list put it at 72 and 34th in the country (August 2026). A reading of 5 would have said "skip". The official list said it is one of the busiest searches there.

How to read it, in order

Look the search up in the official top-500 list for your country. Found: you have real popularity and a rank.
Not found: the search is below the cut-off, about 45 on the 1 to 100 scale. It may still have searches. Say "no official reading", not "dead".
Use Search Ads only to sharpen a number. Never to rule a search out.
To compare countries, use the 1 to 100 score across all categories. The category-only score is not comparable between countries.

Why 500 is not the whole market

Busy categories fill all 500 rows, so a missing word tells you nothing there. A search being absent is a gap in coverage, not a verdict on the market. Apple also exposes search-term popularity through its Apple Ads Platform API, which is where tools can read it from at scale.

Now see how to use the number: how to find keywords for an iOS app and how App Store search works.

Lazy ASO reads Apple's official top-500 searches in 87 countries, shows popularity 1 to 100 per search, and marks a missing search as "not in the list", not as zero. Check a name free.