Glossary

A reference of key terms and metrics used throughout Apptonomy. Platform-wide terms come first; the keyword-scoring metrics you’ll see in the keyword workspace follow.

Platform terms

ASO (App Store Optimization)

The practice of improving how an app performs in the App Store and Google Play — how easily it’s found in search and browse, and how many of the people who see it go on to install. Apptonomy audits a listing across several ASO pillars and turns the findings into ranked edits you can publish.

ASO Pillars

The dimensions an audit grades a listing against. There are four core pillars, plus Localization as a cross-cutting dimension:

Discoverability — keyword-driven and search-driven visibility: can the right people find you?
Conversion — visit-to-install rate: icon, screenshots, and copy that turn a store visit into an install.
Trust — review sentiment and signal quality: does the listing look credible?
AI Discoverability — how well the app surfaces in LLM-powered search and recommendation systems.
Localization — the quality and coverage of translated listing content and screenshots across your target locales.

Each pillar rolls its engine outputs into the overall score.

Audit

A complete ASO assessment of one app at one point in time. It unifies the per-engine analyses into a single ASO Readiness Score, a set of prioritized recommendations, and a breakdown by pillar. You run audits on demand and on a schedule, then compare them over time.

ASO Readiness Score

The overall score, from 0 to 100, indicating how ready an app’s listing is to perform in ASO terms. It’s the headline number on an audit, aggregated from the individual pillar and engine scores.

Revision

An immutable snapshot of one listing edit cycle — your draft changes to the title, subtitle, description, keywords, and screenshots, captured as a single version. You work on a draft, publish it to the store, and the revision preserves exactly what you shipped.

Draft Listing

An in-progress edit of a listing that hasn’t been published yet. It’s where your proposed changes live while you refine them, before they become a published revision.

Anchored App Brief

A structured, canonical description of your app — its positioning, audience, and value — that Apptonomy uses as the grounding context for AI-generated recommendations and content, so suggestions stay true to what your app actually is. See Anchored App Brief for the full workflow.

Watchtower

The project home: a continuous-monitoring surface over your listing, your audits, and your competitive landscape. It’s where you see what changed since you last looked.

Store / Storefront

A store is a distribution platform — the App Store or Google Play. A single project tracks your app across both. A storefront is a store’s country-specific instance — for example, the UK App Store versus the Japan App Store. On the App Store each storefront has its own default (and additional) languages, which is central to how localized listings are shown; see How Localization Works.

Keyword Set

A collection of keywords scoped to one project and locale — the working set of terms you track, score, and target for a listing in a given language and market.

Branded Term

A keyword that includes a brand name — your own, or a competitor’s. Branded terms behave differently from generic keywords, so Apptonomy flags them.

A monitoring metric that tracks your share of keyword visibility against your competitors — how much of the search surface for your tracked keywords you hold, relative to the field.

Quick Win

An audit finding that’s high-impact and low-effort — a change worth doing first because it moves the score for relatively little work. Quick wins are called out as their own section of an audit.

Keyword metrics

Keyword Volume

A score from 0 to 100 that estimates how many people search for a given keyword each month. The score uses a logarithmic scale — the difference between 100 and 1,000 monthly searches is much more significant than the difference between 100,000 and 101,000. A score of 80+ indicates a very popular keyword, while below 20 means very few people are searching for it. The raw search counts come from Google Ads and are calibrated against Apple Search Ads popularity data using a log-linear regression model that is periodically recalibrated.

Keyword Difficulty

A score from 0 to 100 that measures how competitive a keyword is — specifically, how aggressively advertisers bid on it. This data comes from Google Ads’ competition index. A score near 0 means almost nobody is competing for the keyword; a score near 100 means it is fiercely competitive. The sweet spot for ASO opportunities is low difficulty combined with high volume.

Keyword Rank

Your app’s position in the app store search results for a given keyword, ranging from 1 to 50. A rank of 1 means your app is the first result. If your app does not appear in the top 50 results, the rank is reported as 0. Ranks of 1–10 mean you are on the first screen and likely receiving taps. A rank of 30+ means most users will never scroll far enough to find you.

Keyword Relevance

A score from 1 to 100 that measures how closely a keyword relates to what your app actually does. This score is generated by AI analysis that evaluates each keyword in the context of your app’s description and features. Generic filler words and unrelated terms score low, while feature-specific terms, category descriptors, and user-intent phrases score high. Keywords scoring below the relevance threshold (default: 60) are excluded from recommendations to ensure you only see terms that genuinely connect to your app.

Keyword Opportunity

A composite score from 0 to 100 that identifies the most promising keywords to target. It is calculated by combining search volume and difficulty — rewarding high-traffic, low-competition terms — with a trend adjustment that boosts rising keywords and penalises declining ones. A high opportunity score means the keyword has strong search demand, manageable competition, and favourable momentum.

Competitor Ranks

The app store search-result positions that each analysed competitor holds for a given keyword. A rank of 1 means the competitor is the top result; a value of null means the competitor does not appear in the top results. Reviewing competitor ranks helps you gauge how crowded a keyword is and whether higher-ranked competitors will be difficult to displace.