What decides a search result
Two things: whether your text matches, and how your app has performed. Everything else is a detail of one of those.
Apple says it plainly: results are ranked on text relevance (matches in your name, subtitle, keyword field and primary category) and on user behaviour (downloads, ratings and reviews). The text decides whether you are a candidate; the behaviour decides where among the candidates you land.
The indexed text is wider than the three fields. Your developer name and secondary category count. Since June 2025 the captions on your screenshots are read and treated as keywords. Custom product pages can be assigned their own keywords. The description and the promotional text are not indexed at all.
On the behaviour side the numbers that move rank are downloads and, above all, new ratings: the rate at which they arrive and how many downloads each one takes. A listing that gets found and then rates well climbs; one that gets found and rates badly is pushed down for the same term.
So the order of work is fixed. First the text, so you appear for the right terms at all. Then the listing and the app, so people who arrive download and rate. Then more terms and more stores. Nothing later in the list fixes a missing earlier step.
In the US store, read October 4
- 7,471 head terms are analyzed in the US store, the top 500 searches of every genre. 25,003 distinct apps hold every top-10 slot on the 7,471 of them at popularity 25 or more; the 100 most present hold 14% of the slots.