Keywords & Clusters
The Keywords & Clusters page turns a completed audit into a working keyword list. It sits under Discovery and is organized into six tabs — Rank History, Analysis, Existing, Suggested, Competitors, and Explorer — that walk you from a high-level read of your keyword health down to the specific terms worth targeting.
Before you start
- Run an audit for the project first. The Analysis, Existing, Suggested, and Competitors tabs read from your most recent completed audit, so an empty page usually means no audit has finished yet.
- Check the storefront and locale badges next to the page title. The whole page is scoped to one country and one language at a time; the same term scores differently in different markets.
- Use the Methodology button (top right) whenever you want the exact rules behind a number.
The six tabs
Rank History
The Rank History tab comes first because it answers the question the other tabs lead up to: did a listing change move your rankings? It plots the observed search positions of your tracked keywords over time for the storefront and market in view. Rank 1 is best, and positions are tracked to the top 50: a hollow point means the app ranked outside the top 50 on that capture, and a dashed segment bridges a period that wasn’t captured. On Google Play, search shows only about 20–40 apps per term, so there a hollow point means your app did not appear in Google Play’s results. Dashed vertical lines mark your own title, subtitle, and keyword-field changes, and hollow diamonds mark competitor listing changes; when an audit captured one of your changes, its marker’s label opens the store change or the audit that recorded it.
Pick the market, set the window (30, 60, or 90 days, all time, or a custom range), and group terms to compare them. Summary tiles show Visibility (a search-volume-weighted score), Keywords in top 10, Average rank, and Slipping. The Tracked keywords table lists every keyword seen in the range with its source (Yours if someone on your team added it, Recommended if an audit supplied it), its volume, opportunity, relevance, and difficulty scores, its latest rank, and its change and trend over the window. Add terms to tracking or remove them from the table’s selection toolbar, and export the table as CSV. Below it, the rank distribution shows how your tracked keywords spread across rank bands in each captured week, the visibility trend and share of voice compare your app with the competitors you chart, and the recommendations card re-reads the audit’s recommendations against dated rank and competitor movement.
Analysis
The Analysis tab is the summary view. It shows your overall keyword health score, the engine’s insights, and the Cross-field Opportunities card — terms that appear in one part of your listing but are missing from higher-weight fields like the title or subtitle. Start here to decide whether keywords are a priority for this listing at all.
Existing
The Existing tab lists the terms your app already ranks for, plus the keywords the engine extracted directly from your listing text. Each row carries its volume, difficulty, opportunity, and relevance scores and your current rank. The Identified Clusters card groups these terms into themes so you can see which topics your listing already covers. Use this tab to find rankings worth protecting and near-miss terms worth pushing higher.
Suggested
The Suggested tab lists terms your app does not yet rank for, sorted by opportunity, alongside a Recommended Clusters card. These are the growth candidates — new terms with real search demand and manageable competition. Use this tab to pick the keywords you want to work into a revision.
Competitors
The Competitors tab shows a keyword matrix: for each of your keywords, which of the competitors in your audit rank for it and where. This tells you how crowded a term is and which rivals you would have to displace. It is about keyword overlap — for adding and monitoring specific competitor apps, see Managing Competitors.
Explorer
The Explorer tab is a lookup tool over Apptonomy’s keyword corpus for the storefront and market in view, rather than a step in the audit flow. It opens on your own app: every keyword the app has been seen ranking for in this market within the last 365 days, with its tracking status, last observed rank, popularity, average monthly searches, and first and last seen dates, and a one-click Track on each row. The list opens sorted by popularity, then monthly searches; you can sort by last observed rank or first seen instead. The last observed rank is where the app sat the last time that term’s search results were captured, not a live rank, so on a keyword you don’t track it carries its date, for example #1 · seen Oct 1, 2026. A search for your app’s own name usually puts it first, which is why brand terms read #1. Use the Keywords for picker to switch to one of your tracked competitors, or choose Search the corpus to search the whole corpus by term. Click any term to open its page: its search-volume history and observations, difficulty, the apps ranking for it, and related terms. Coverage is the keywords Apptonomy has tracked or audited, not every keyword in the store, and search-volume figures are Google Ads web searches, not store searches. Lists are capped, and a note under the list says so when there is more than it shows.
Reading the scores
Every keyword row uses the same four scores — volume, difficulty, opportunity, and relevance — plus your current rank. Opportunity is the single number to sort by; difficulty and volume feed into it. For what each score means and how the bands are colored, see Keyword Scoring.