Keyword metrics explained

What Popularity, Difficulty, Opportunity, and Ranking apps mean in PeekPanda’s ASO surfaces.

Last reviewed October 19, 2026Download Markdown ↓

PeekPanda reads a keyword with four signals: Popularity, Difficulty, Ranking apps, and Opportunity. The app case file and the ASO workstation both use these words for the same numbers. They help you shortlist phrases to investigate; they are not App Store search volume, paid-advertising data, or a promise of ranking results.

All current keyword observations are for the US storefront in English.

Popularity

Popularity is how much a phrase is searched, from 0 to 100. It has two possible readings, and every score says which one produced it in its tooltip.

Where PeekPanda has collected Apple’s own weekly search popularity for the phrase, that is the reading. It is Apple’s relative score for that search term in the US App Store over one completed Sunday to Saturday week, and the score carries that week with it. It is relative popularity, never a count of searches.

Where no such observation exists, PeekPanda falls back to a weaker reading: how prominently the store suggests the phrase and closely related phrases when people type. That is Apple’s autocomplete ordering, not a measurement of search activity.

Popularity is unavailable when neither reading has been collected. An unavailable value is shown as a dash, never as a zero. Those are different states.

Difficulty

Difficulty describes how established the leading apps in a collected search result appear to be, from 0 to 100. It is the median rating count of the apps on page one of the observed result set, on a log scale where a million ratings reads as 100. A higher number generally means more established competitors are present. Below three rated apps on page one, PeekPanda says the evidence is weak.

It does not measure relevance, conversion, product quality, or the effort your own app will need. Older apps can remain highly rated even when their current momentum is limited.

Opportunity

Opportunity weighs the two against each other: popularity × (100 − difficulty) ÷ 100. A phrase people search a lot but nobody owns scores near its Popularity; the same phrase behind a page one of million-rating apps scores near zero. It is a directional shortlisting aid, most useful for comparing terms from the same observation period, then opening the underlying results to check relevance and the apps actually present.

Opportunity is derived, never collected, so it is only as fresh as the older of its two inputs. It is unavailable when either input is unavailable. It does not tell you whether a keyword will convert, whether your app is a fit, or whether the resulting traffic is valuable.

Ranking apps

Ranking apps is the number of apps returned in the collected public search result. It is a count of that observation, not a count of every app competing for the phrase. The store may limit what a single response reveals.

Position

Position is where an app sat in the collected search result, with how far it moved since the run before it. A keyword with only one collection run shows the position alone, because there is nothing yet to compare it against.

Positions are always observed search-result positions. They are never presented as a guaranteed native App Store rank.

Reading a keyword well

Check the observation date before comparing phrases.
Read the visible result set, not only the score.
Check which reading produced a Popularity score before leaning on it.
Use an unavailable value as a reason to collect better evidence, not as a zero.
Validate a promising phrase against your product, listing, and customer language.

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