How to Track App Store Keyword Rankings With One API

App Store keyword ranking is one of those numbers everyone wants and nobody has cleanly. The rankings live inside the store UI, so the honest answer to "where do we rank" is usually someone checking a phone and typing positions into a spreadsheet. This walks through doing it once, as data, with the Apple App Store Search API.

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Why the App Store has no clean ranking API

Apple's developer APIs manage your own apps. The old media search endpoint that gets passed around is not the App Store search ranking: it returns a different order than what users actually see, with no device targeting and no ASO-grade fields. So App Store tracking runs on a scraper consumed like an API. Keyword in, the ranked result list out.

What one keyword search returns

The scraper returns one row per app: the ranking position for that keyword, app and bundle IDs, developer name and ID, average rating and rating count, price, version and release date, genres, age rating, and the search country, language, and timestamp on every row. Every row is self-documenting, which matters the day you diff two runs and need to know exactly which storefront produced each one.

Run the App Store scraper

Fire a run over REST with a keyword and a country. Positions come back in rank order.

POST /v2/acts/johnvc~apple-app-store-search/runs

{ "term": "meditation", "country": "us", "num": 50, "max_pages": 1 }

The prefilled version is the task Check App Store keyword rankings: one keyword, the full ranked list, positions per app.

Turn it into rank history

Tracking is just that search on a loop. Save a task per keyword, keep country and device constant, schedule it, and diff position by app_id across runs. That series is what every ASO dashboard is built on, except you own the raw data instead of renting an opinion. The same raw sets also power free ASO keyword research: pull the result lists for candidate keywords and judge difficulty from who actually ranks.

Search the App Store from an agent

The Actor is MCP-ready, so Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor can call it mid-conversation. "Find the top 50 meditation apps in the US store with ratings and prices" becomes one tool call. The task Search the App Store from Claude via MCP has the config.

FAQ about the App Store scraper

How much does the App Store scraper cost?

Pay per event: a small setup fee per run plus a per-app fee. A quick 10-app keyword check is a few cents, a 200-app scan a few dimes, and num and max_pages cap the spend.

Can the scraper track keyword rankings over time?

Yes. Save a task per keyword, hold country and device constant, schedule it, and diff position by app_id across runs. That is the whole App Store tracking loop.

Does the scraper work outside the US store?

Yes: 50-plus country storefronts and 40-plus languages via the country and lang inputs, so one keyword can be compared across the US, UK, Japan, and Brazil in a handful of runs.

What does the search scraper not return?

Full product detail. Search returns the ranked list with rich metadata per app; descriptions, in-app purchases, and sample reviews live in the sibling Apple App Store Product API. Search here, then fan out by app_id.

Point the Apple App Store Search API at your keywords and let the rankings come to you.