TL;DR
- Apple's App Store and Google Play together moved 136 billion downloads in 2024, with consumer spend crossing 150 billion dollars for the first time according to Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2025.
- 65 percent of App Store downloads happen directly after a search, per Apple's own data cited in Wikipedia's App Store Optimization entry. Discovery in app stores is overwhelmingly query-driven, just like Google.
- In June 2025 Apple started indexing visible text from screenshot captions, which means visual assets now feed the same keyword index as your title and subtitle. That alone broke half the ASO playbooks online.
- Keyword research, entity strength, ratings as social proof, and competitive gap analysis all transfer cleanly from SEO. Backlinks, technical crawling, and most schema work do not.
- Apple's keyword field is 100 characters, hidden from users, and rewards uncombined terms. Google Play indexes the entire long description and weights it more like a web page.
- Apple's 2026 expansion of search ads, plus the Gemini-powered Siri update, is pushing App Store discovery toward something that looks closer to a Google SERP every quarter.
- For SEO agencies, ASO is the cleanest service stack add you'll find this year. The clients already have apps. Nobody is doing it well for them.
Why I started taking ASO seriously again
I run a small link-building and SEO agency. For years I treated app store work the way most SEO consultants do, which is to nod politely when a client mentioned it and quietly hope they wouldn't ask me to handle it.
Then one of my SaaS clients showed me their attribution data. About 38 percent of their new paid users were coming from organic App Store search. Their website was getting more traffic, but the app was where the money actually changed hands. That ratio is not unusual. Datareportal's Digital 2025 report notes that smartphone users spend less than 6 percent of their total mobile time inside browsers and search engines, with the rest happening inside apps.
So I started learning ASO properly. Six months in, I can tell you exactly which of my SEO instincts transferred, which got me into trouble, and why the 2026 changes from Apple are about to make this a much more important service line for any agency that wants to keep up with where search is going. If you're already building out a search-everywhere optimisation practice, this slots in beside it without much friction.
What ASO and SEO actually share
More than people think. Both are about matching what someone types into a search box with the most relevant result, and both rely on a mix of relevance signals plus quality signals to decide ranking order.
Here are the bits that map across one to one.
Keyword research methodology
The core process is identical. You build a seed list, expand it with intent variations, score by volume and competition, then cluster by user job. The tools change, the logic doesn't. If you're already using Ahrefs or Semrush for web work, you've already developed the muscle. You just point it at AppFollow, Sensor Tower, or AppTweak instead.
What's different is the query length. Apple's data from Apple Search Ads suggests app store queries skew much shorter than Google queries. People type "meditation" not "best meditation app for beginners with sleep stories". That changes how you build your keyword list, but it does not change how you think about it. The same shift applies to anyone who's already worked on mobile search optimisation, where intent gets compressed into fewer words.
Entity strength and brand recognition
If your client is a recognised brand, that signal helps in both places. Google's E-E-A-T framework has a clear cousin in the App Store's emphasis on developer reputation, app age, and update history. The work I do on entity optimisation for AI search carries over here. A clear entity, consistent brand mentions across the web, and a strong knowledge graph footprint all feed into how Apple's algorithm treats a developer.
Ratings and reviews as quality signals
Reviews on the App Store work much like reviews in local SEO. They're a public quality signal, they influence click-through, and they directly affect rankings. Apple confirms in its official App Store search documentation that ratings and reviews are part of the ranking equation, alongside downloads and metadata relevance.
If you're already running review acquisition campaigns for service businesses, the same playbook applies. I wrote about this for medical practices in my Google reviews guide for doctors and the underlying mechanics map almost perfectly. Ask at the moment of value. Make it stupid easy. Never offer incentives. Respond to the bad ones publicly and calmly.
Competitive gap analysis
This is where SEO pros have an obvious edge over typical product marketers. You already know how to find which keywords competitors rank for, which they're missing, and which represent realistic wins. Run the same exercise inside an ASO tool and you'll outperform 80 percent of the in-house ASO teams I've audited in the last year. Most of them are doing surface-level keyword tracking without competitor delta analysis.
Conversion rate optimisation
A store listing is a landing page. Screenshots, icons, and previews are the hero section. The description is the body copy. Every CRO instinct you've built for web pages translates: hierarchy of information, social proof placement, visual storytelling, and clear value props above the fold. The only difference is the layout constraints and the fact that you can A/B test more cleanly via Apple's product page tests and Google Play's store listing experiments.
What doesn't transfer (and where I burned a few hours learning the hard way)
This is the part nobody talks about. There are real, structural differences that will trip you up if you assume ASO is just SEO with different tools.
Backlinks don't move App Store rankings
None. Zero. You can build the most beautiful tier-one PR campaign for an iOS app and it will not directly move keyword rankings inside Apple's App Store. Apple's algorithm doesn't crawl the web for backlinks the way Google does.
Google Play is different. According to Google Play's discovery documentation, the algorithm considers user relevance, app quality, editorial value, and overall user experience. It does pull in some web signals, and there's reasonable evidence that backlinks to your Play Store URL contribute to ranking. But the weight is much lower than for a typical website. If you're running a white hat link building campaign for an app, the ROI comes through brand search, branded query lift, and indirect referral traffic. Not through direct ASO ranking gains on iOS.
I lost a month thinking I could push App Store rankings with PR. I couldn't. The PR moved branded search, which moved organic installs through brand discovery. That's still valuable, but it's a different mechanic.
Technical SEO mostly doesn't apply
There's no robots.txt for the App Store. There's no crawl budget. No JavaScript rendering issues. No core web vitals (in the web sense). The whole stack of technical work that earns a technical SEO audit its keep on the web side is replaced by a different set of technical concerns: app size, crash rates, launch time, retention, and update cadence. These are the Apple and Google equivalents of technical health.
Google Play has Android Vitals, which is essentially a quality dashboard that feeds into ranking. Apps with high ANR (application not responding) rates or excessive battery drain get penalised. This is closer to a Core Web Vitals analogue than anything else in ASO, and it sits inside the Play Console rather than anywhere a typical SEO would think to look.
Schema markup is mostly irrelevant
The App Store doesn't read schema. Google Play doesn't either, in the traditional sense. Your structured data work matters only for your app's marketing site, where it can drive rich results and AI Overview citations. I still recommend schema on the website for any app, but don't expect it to do anything inside the stores themselves.
Apple's keyword field is invisible
This one catches every SEO. Apple gives you a separate 100-character keyword field in App Store Connect that users never see. Words you put there are indexed for search but don't appear on the listing. Google Play has no equivalent. There you get a title, a short description, and a long description, and all of them are visible to users.
This means iOS and Android need genuinely different content strategies. The iOS keyword field is a place for terms you want to rank for but can't justify writing into user-facing copy. The Google Play long description is where you write naturally, with keywords sprinkled in a way that reads well for humans.
The 2025 and 2026 changes that broke older ASO advice
Apple has made several updates in the last year that have meaningfully changed what works. If you read any ASO guide written before June 2025, throw it out.
Screenshot caption text is now indexed
In June 2025, Apple started extracting visible text from screenshot captions and feeding it into the search index. This was confirmed by multiple ASO research firms tracking ranking changes and aligns with Apple's broader push toward computer-vision-based metadata extraction.
What this means in practice: the words you put on your screenshots now compete and complement your keyword field. You can effectively expand your indexed keywords beyond the 100-character limit by adding strategic captions. This rewards SEO pros who already think in keyword clusters, because you can pre-plan caption copy to fill semantic gaps in your title and keyword field.
I've found Apple seems to weight the top and bottom of screenshots more heavily than the middle, possibly because OCR confidence is higher in clear text zones. Place priority keywords there.
Custom product pages now show up in organic search
Until July 2025, custom product pages only appeared through paid Apple Search Ads campaigns. After that, Apple started surfacing them organically when a user's query matched the keywords assigned to a custom page. This means a single app can now hold multiple ranking positions for related queries, each with its own optimised screenshots and value prop.
This is the closest thing the App Store has to programmatic SEO. One app, multiple landing pages, each targeted at a different intent cluster. The discipline is the same, the implementation is different.
Apple Intelligence and Siri's Gemini integration
Apple's January 2026 partnership with Google to bring Gemini into Siri's foundation models, documented on Wikipedia, is going to push App Store discovery further away from pure keyword matching and toward semantic understanding. Siri-driven app suggestions, surfaced through Apple Intelligence on iOS 26 and later, are starting to behave less like a directory lookup and more like an AI answer.
If you're already optimising for Apple Intelligence and the Siri search layer, the same entity-first principles apply to apps. A well-described app with clear functional language, consistent brand mentions, and structured metadata will get suggested by Siri more often than one that's keyword-stuffed. Similar logic applies to anyone working on voice search optimisation, since the speech-to-app-result pipeline is converging fast.
Expanded ad inventory in 2026
Apple announced in late 2025 that starting in 2026 they'd be expanding ad placements throughout App Store search results, not just at the top. This is the same trajectory Google followed with its SERP between 2010 and 2020. More ads, less organic real estate, higher pressure on organic ranking quality. The implication for ASO pros is identical to the implication for SEO pros: the top organic positions are becoming worth more, and the lower ones are becoming worth less.
A practical workflow I use for ASO clients
This is the part I wish someone had given me six months ago. Here's the actual process I run for a new ASO engagement, end to end.
- Pull the baseline. Export the current store listings (both iOS and Android), screenshot every visible element, and snapshot current keyword rankings using AppTweak or Sensor Tower. You can't measure improvement if you didn't measure the start.
- Run a keyword discovery sprint. Start with five seed terms. Expand into intent clusters: "problem solving", "comparison", "brand-adjacent", "feature-led". Score by volume, difficulty, and current rank. Same logic as web keyword research, smaller numbers.
- Audit the metadata against Apple's review guidelines. Apple's App Store Review Guidelines are strict on metadata accuracy. Section 2.3.7 in particular bans irrelevant keywords, trademarked terms, and competitor names. I've seen clients get apps rejected for this. Catch it now.
- Rewrite the title, subtitle, and keyword field for iOS. Apple's title is up to 30 characters, the subtitle is up to 30, and the keyword field is 100. Don't waste characters on duplicates. Apple combines words from the keyword field into multi-word search terms automatically, so you can list components rather than full phrases.
- Rewrite the title, short description, and long description for Google Play. Google reads the entire long description and weights it semantically, so write for humans with keywords in natural positions. The first 80 characters of the short description are critical because they appear above the fold.
- Plan screenshot captions as a keyword expansion exercise. Treat captions like meta descriptions plus H2 headings on a landing page. They sell to humans and feed the algorithm at the same time. Place high-priority keywords in the top and bottom thirds.
- Set up review acquisition. Pick the in-app moment of highest user satisfaction and trigger the iOS native review prompt or a Play Store equivalent at that moment. Never trigger after a paywall hit or a failed action. I've seen this single change move an app from a 3.8 to a 4.4 over three months.
- A/B test the icon and first screenshot. These are the highest-impact conversion elements. Apple's product page optimisation tool and Google Play's store listing experiments are free. Use them.
- Measure weekly, not daily. ASO rankings move slowly on iOS and faster on Google Play, but daily monitoring will drive you mad. Weekly trend data is enough.
- Coordinate with the website team. Your app marketing site should rank for the branded "[app name] download" queries, push branded search volume up, and feed install momentum. This is where your SEO and link building services become a force multiplier for the ASO work.
The case for SEO agencies adding ASO to their stack
Most ASO is done badly. Apps usually have either a product marketer who doesn't think in search, or an ad-buying team that focuses on Apple Search Ads and ignores organic. SEO agencies, especially ones that already do content and on-page work, have most of the muscles needed.
The pricing math also works. Most clients with apps are paying a developer or a junior product marketer to handle store listings, which means quality is uneven. A real SEO consultant offering ASO as a paid service typically charges between 2,000 and 8,000 dollars a month per app, depending on portfolio size. That's similar margin to retainer SEO, with less ongoing content production needed because the artefacts are smaller.
For existing clients, ASO is also the easiest cross-sell I've found in years. If they have an app and you already manage their organic search, you've earned the right to ask about the App Store. I've added ASO retainers to four existing accounts in the last quarter without any new sales work, just by including it in monthly review conversations.
What helps is showing what's already working in your portfolio. When I pitched ASO to a SaaS client, I leaned on the same evidence structure I use for web SEO: a clear before/after with proper attribution. The work in our case study on Be Cool Refrigeration and the rankings progression in Aircon Ultra moving from position 90 to page 3 translates directly. App ranking charts look almost identical to web ranking charts. Same psychology, different platform.
How ASO connects to AI search and the wider search-everywhere world
The convergence between search and ASO is happening faster than most people realise. Three threads are running together.
First, AI search assistants are starting to recommend apps directly in their answers. When I ask ChatGPT or Gemini for app recommendations, they cite well-described, well-reviewed apps that have strong web presence. The skills I use for getting brands cited in ChatGPT and AI Overviews apply directly to app discovery through AI assistants, and the wider AI search citation strategy I've been refining is starting to influence app surfacing as much as web surfacing.
Second, Apple Intelligence and Google's Gemini integration are pushing app discovery toward conversational queries. Instead of typing "running app" into the App Store, users are starting to ask Siri "what's the best app for tracking trail runs that works without signal". The app that answers that intent best, in its metadata, in its reviews, and in its web presence, gets surfaced. This is the same shift I covered in the personal intelligence AI mode rollout for free users.
Third, TikTok search and Gen Z search patterns are influencing how younger users find apps. They search on TikTok, click through to App Store listings, and the entire funnel sits across three platforms. ASO has to account for this because App Store traffic from social search behaves differently from App Store traffic from in-store search.
The upshot is that ASO is no longer a contained discipline. It's becoming a thread inside the broader work of being findable. If you're already thinking about zero-click visibility and local popularity signals, ASO sits naturally beside both.
Where ASO is genuinely different from SEO
A few honest constraints worth flagging before you sell this as a service.
The data is worse. ASO tools are years behind SEO tools in depth and accuracy. Keyword volume estimates from Sensor Tower, AppTweak, and Mobile Action often disagree by an order of magnitude. You have to pick a tool, stick with it, and treat the numbers as directional rather than absolute.
The attribution is harder. App Store Connect and Google Play Console give you organic install attribution, but you can't easily see which specific keyword drove an install the way you can in Google Search Console. Apple Search Ads attribution is cleaner for paid, but organic remains a black box.
Reviews can sink you in a way they can't on web. A single bad update with a flood of one-star reviews can tank an app's rankings for months. There's no equivalent recovery playbook to a Google core update recovery plan. The fix is to ship a better update, win back reviews over time, and accept the timeline.
Apple is more closed than Google. App Store ranking changes happen with less warning, less documentation, and less community signal than Google updates. You will spend more time on inference and less on direct evidence than you're used to.
What to do this week
If you've read this far and you're considering adding ASO to your service stack, here's the order I'd run.
- Pick one existing client with an app. Pull their current iOS and Android listings, run them through a free tier of AppTweak or Sensor Tower, and snapshot their current visibility score.
- Find three keywords they should rank for and don't. Use the same gap analysis you'd run for web. Write a one-page memo with the opportunity and the suggested metadata changes.
- Audit their screenshots for caption keywords. Are they using captions at all? Are they using them well? This alone is often a quick win since Apple started indexing captions in June 2025.
- Check their review velocity over the last 90 days. If it's flat, propose a review acquisition plan tied to in-app value moments.
- Send the memo with a paid scope. ASO retainers are easier to sell than people think because the audit work is fast and the deliverables are concrete.
If you want a second pair of eyes on the current state of a client's search visibility across web, app, and AI, I run a free version of this analysis through my free SEO audit tool. It won't replace a full ASO engagement, but it'll surface the obvious gaps in under a minute. If you'd rather look at proof first, the case study archive has a few apps and websites I've worked on. The short version of all this: ASO is no longer optional for SEO agencies that want to keep clients past 2026. The skills you already have transfer cleanly. The differences are real but learnable. And the timing, with Apple's algorithm changes, Siri's AI upgrades, and the broader convergence of search and app discovery, is about as good as it gets.
