Popularity 5: what changed in September 2025 and what to do now
Apple re-scored most mid-tail terms to its floor. How to read demand for a term that shows <5, and why the top 10 matters more than the number now.
In late September 2025 Apple Ads began reporting the floor value, 5, for most search terms that had sat between about 10 and 40, and left the head terms alone. Tools that sold popularity as their main number spent weeks deciding whether to show the old values or the new; the new ones are what Apple reports, and they are what is shown here, as <5.
A term at <5 is not a term nobody types. It is a term Apple stopped ranking the demand of. The evidence is in the results: if the top 10 for a <5 term holds apps with thousands of ratings whose names carry the term, people are typing it, because those apps did not get those ratings from nowhere. The keyword page shows the last month a term was in a genre's top 500 and what it scored then, so a term that was 32 in August 2025 and <5 since can be read for what it is.
What to do: rank candidate terms by the top 10 rather than the number. For a <5 term, the difficulty inputs (median ratings of the ten, how many carry the words in the name, how many shipped recently) are the demand signal, and your own position over time is the proof. A term where you hold #3 and gain ratings is working, whatever Apple reports for it.
For the head terms, nothing changed: popularity above 25 still means what it did, and the winnable range in the popularity chapter still applies. The mid-tail is where the number went quiet, and the mid-tail is where most indie apps live.
In order
- 01For every term on your list showing <5, open its page. Note the last month it was scored and the score.
- 02Read its top 10. Thousands of ratings and the term in the names: keep it, it is typed. Thin apps, old updates, no name matches: drop it.
- 03Watch your position on the kept terms for two weeks. A position that holds while the rating count grows is a term with demand.
- 04Keep two or three head terms (popularity 25 or more) on the list as a control, so you can see when a move is yours and when it is the store's.