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Checking keyword difficulty by reading the actual search results

How to verify an ASO tool's difficulty score by searching the App Store yourself — count ratings of top results and check whether they carry the keyword in their title.

Updated 2026-10-23·2 sources·asokeyword-difficultycompetitor-research

Checking keyword difficulty by reading the actual search results

TL;DR

  • After the tool says “low difficulty”, search the keyword in the App Store and look at the top ~7 results.1
  • Two signals: ratings count of each ranking app (proxy for revenue and downloads) and whether the keyword is in its title.12
  • Many ratings + keyword in title = skip. E.g. “sleep sounds”: a top app has 205,000 ratings and “sleep sounds” in its title.2
  • Low ratings and few exact-title matches = go. “Brown noise”: #1 had ~645 ratings, #7 only 11, few apps with it in the title.1
  • Tools can be wrong in both directions — one client keyword the tool flagged as competitive had no app with it in the title and hit #1 at launch.3

Details

Procedure from Steve P. Young’s August 2026 walkthrough:

  1. Take a candidate from the tool (e.g. “brown noise”: search score 35, ASOMobile complexity 2.5, i.e. under his threshold of 3).1
  2. Search it on an iPhone. For each top result note the ratings count and whether the exact phrase is in the app name.1
  3. Judge: an app with hundreds of thousands of ratings and the term in its title will be rewarded by Apple — “you’re probably not going to beat them”.2 A spread of small apps (hundreds or tens of ratings) means a new app can realistically reach #1.1
  4. Sanity-check famous brands too: Endel targets “focus” and “sleep sounds” in its title but does not rank #1 for either — the big player isn’t safe on head terms either.4

Spotting beatable leaders. When an app with few ratings ranks well among giants, study it. In the “calorie tracker” results, Calorie AI ranked with ~4,000 ratings next to MyFitnessPal (2.1M), Lose It (700K) and Cal AI (200K) — a sign the term rewards metadata more than brand size, and a good app to mine for keywords (Mining competitors' keywords and listing history (ASOMobile workflow)).5

Disagreements / caveats

  • Ratings are a proxy, not a ranking input you can see directly; Steve uses them because they correlate with revenue and downloads.2

See also

Footnotes

  1. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 09:49 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 11:29 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 14:59 — Steve P. Young ↩

  4. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 10:40 — Steve P. Young ↩

  5. The Most Important Element of App Store Optimization (ASO Keyword Research) @ 05:38 — Steve P. Young ↩