How Altitude measures ranks, demand and difficulty

For the App Store, Altitude reads Apple's public search results for each keyword in the country you pick and stores the top 200 in order. For Google Play, it reads the public search page, which showed about 20 to 30 apps in our own checks, so Play ranks go to the top 30 at most.

Checks run on our servers without a signed in account. Your phone may show a different order: Apple says it personalizes parts of the App Store using your activity, and the App Store app puts a sponsored result above the first organic one. What matters is that every check is made the same way, so changes from one check to the next are real changes.

If a check fails, that day is stored as unknown. It is never shown as a drop.

Apple only shares search popularity with Apple Ads accounts, and Google shares none. Altitude estimates demand from something public: how established the apps in a search's top 10 are. For each of the top 10 we take the log of its ratings count, weight the top positions more, and scale the result from 0 to 100. Searches with fewer than 10 results score lower.

We tested it against Apple Ads' own popularity scores (1 to 5) for 97 US searches on 2026-11-06. The estimate ranks those searches in the same order with a Spearman correlation of 0.60. We also tried the number of results and the number of words in the search; neither helped, so neither is used.

Difficulty looks at the apps you would have to pass to get into the top 10: how established the three weakest apps there are, and how many of the ten carry every word of the search in their name. Half of the score comes from each. It correlates only 0.28 with demand, so the two numbers say different things.

Opportunity combines demand, difficulty and your current rank. It is highest for real demand, beatable competition and a rank just outside the top 10, and lowest for searches you already own.

Each keyword's top 10 is worth 55 points: 10 for #1 down to 1 for #10. Share of search is the points an app holds across your keywords, divided by the total. It moves when you or a competitor gains or loses top 10 spots.

Modeled downloads or revenue for other apps. We have no way to observe them, so we do not invent them.