App Store keyword optimization: limits, rules, and what actually ranks

The rules that save characters

• No spaces after commas: "budget,tracker,expense" – spaces count against the 100-character limit and add nothing.
• Use single words, not phrases. Apple combines words across your name, subtitle, and keyword field to match multi-word searches, so "budget" and "tracker" together already cover "budget tracker".
• Skip plurals when you have the singular – Apple matches both forms. "expense" covers "expenses".
• Never repeat a word from your name or subtitle in the keyword field. It is already indexed; the repeat is pure waste.
• Skip your app's category name, the word "app", and your own brand name – Apple indexes those automatically.
• Common misspellings and competitor names technically fit but violate Apple's guidelines and can get metadata rejected – not worth it.

Where the extra budget hides: locales

Every locale has its own 30+30+100 characters, and storefronts index more than one locale. The United States storefront, for example, also indexes Spanish (Mexico) – so a US-only app can double its indexed keywords by filling in the Spanish (Mexico) locale, a trick usually called cross-localization. Similar pairings exist on other storefronts (the UK indexes several, and so on).

This is also why keyword work does not translate: users in Germany do not search the German translation of your English keywords, they search the words German speakers actually use. Rebuild the list per market rather than translating it.

What changed recently

• Screenshot captions are indexed: since mid-2025, Apple extracts text from your screenshots via OCR and uses it as a ranking signal. Caption text used to be decorative; now it is metadata – write captions with search terms in mind.
• Custom product pages appear in search results for their assigned keywords, and Apple raised the limit to 70 active pages per app in early 2026 – each one is another chance to rank for a specific query with a tailored page.
• Conversion feeds ranking: Apple ranks partly on how often people who see your app download it, so keywords that attract the wrong audience can hurt the ranking of every other keyword. Relevance beats volume.

Auditing your current keywords

The fastest wins come from an audit rather than new research: find the duplicated words across name, subtitle, and keyword field, the plurals sitting next to singulars, and the spaces after commas, then spend the recovered characters on new terms. Doing that across 30 locales by hand in the App Store Connect website is genuinely painful – each locale is a separate slow page with no overview.

This is one of the things Itsyconnect was built for: it shows per-locale character budgets at a glance, flags duplicates across name, subtitle, and keywords, and (with your own AI key) suggests terms to fill the recovered space. Free and open source, so the audit costs nothing but the download.