How to Find Low-Competition App Store Keywords That Actually Rank

Stop chasing keywords you can't win

Ranking #1 for a keyword with difficulty 20 and Search Popularity 40 puts you on top of a results page that is shown roughly 3,000 times a day — and most taps on that page go to the top 3 results. Ranking #50 for a difficulty-80 keyword gives you almost nothing. Low-competition keywords you can actually rank for beat competitive keywords where you're invisible.

Most indie developers spend their keyword metadata on aspirational terms like "photo editor" or "fitness tracker." (Our 6-step keyword research workflow covers the full process from seed keywords to optimized metadata.) Those results pages belong to apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings. The better play is finding keywords where the competition is beatable and there is evidence of real demand.

This guide starts with what Sonar's own data says a low-competition keyword looks like, then gives five ways to find them and a worked example with real numbers.

What Sonar's data says about low-competition keywords

To ground the advice below, we pulled two samples from Sonar's database on October 1, 2026:

• 3,510 US keywords measured on both stores: the same phrase, storefront and language, with App Store and Google Play metrics both refreshed between September 1 and October 1, 2026.
• 4,629 US App Store keyword top 10s, refreshed between September 28 and October 1, 2026, with the rating counts of the apps in them.

Both samples are keywords that Sonar users track or that Sonar discovered for their apps, so they lean toward app-category niche terms rather than brand names. Difficulty is Sonar's own 0–100 score, computed per store. App Store positions come from Apple's iTunes Search API, which orders results by text relevance. In a June 2026 check on 14 queries it matched true App Store order within about two places through the top 20, but a larger August 2026 check found long-tail terms reading 20–40 places too optimistic, so treat iOS positions as close on head terms and optimistic on the tail.

Most keywords read Apple's popularity floor

94.5% of the 3,510 US keywords sat at Apple's Search Popularity floor of 5. Across all of the roughly 1.67 million iOS keywords Sonar has an Apple popularity reading for, 98% do. Only 194 keywords in the US sample read above the floor, and their median was 53.

A 5 means "below Apple's reporting cutoff", not "nobody searches". But it does mean the classic target of "low difficulty and Search Popularity 35–55" describes a small slice of keywords. For most long-tail phrases you will judge demand from other evidence: autocomplete, competitor rankings and Sonar's proxy estimate.

What "low difficulty" means in numbers

In the US sample, App Store difficulty had quartiles of 46, 60 and 69. A keyword under 46 is already in the easiest quarter, and the "under 35" target used in this guide is well inside it. On Google Play the same keywords read 36, 56 and 71.

Across all 71 storefronts in the wider sample, App Store difficulty was lower (quartiles 31, 50 and 64). The keyword mix differs between storefronts, so read that as a hint that the US is the harder market, not as a like-for-like comparison. The country table under strategy 4 shows the same pattern for identical keywords.

The exact phrase is rarely in the top 10 app names

How many of the top 10 apps carry the exact keyword in their app name? In the US sample, about 1 in 10 on both stores (9.6% on the App Store, 9.1% on Google Play), and two-thirds of App Store top 10s had no such app at all. It depends heavily on keyword length:

Source: Sonar, 3,501 US keywords with both stores' top 10 analyzed, metrics refreshed Sep 1–Oct 1, 2026. A match is the keyword appearing as text inside the app name; subtitles and short descriptions are not counted.

This doesn't prove that a title match wins a keyword. It does mean that "few title matches in the top 10", one of the signals below, is the normal state for phrases of two words or more. If you put a three-word phrase in your title, you're likely the only app in the top 10 that has it there.

A big rating count at #1 is common, but not a rule

Take the median rating count of each of the 4,629 US App Store top 10s: for the typical keyword it was about 5,900 ratings, under 1,350 for the lightest quarter of keywords and over 18,000 for the heaviest quarter. But the #1 app had more ratings than the #2 app only 51% of the time, and in 17.5% of these top 10s the #1 app had fewer than 100 ratings. In 18%, the #1 app had less than a tenth of the top-10 median's ratings.

Two practical readings follow. A keyword whose top 10 has a median under about 1,350 ratings is in the lightest quarter of the market. And a heavy top 10 is not automatically closed: about one results page in six is led by an app with under 100 ratings.

The other store is a separate race

For the same US keyword, Sonar rated Google Play slightly easier at the median (56 vs 60 on the App Store). A third of the keywords were 10+ points easier on Google Play, 19% were 10+ points harder, and 48% were within 10 points. Across all 71 storefronts the sign flipped: the typical keyword scored 6 points higher on Google Play, and 43% of keywords were 10+ points harder there. If your app is on both stores, pick targets per store and per country.

What makes a keyword "low competition"

Keyword difficulty scores condense competitive analysis into a single number, but knowing what drives that number helps you spot opportunities the score alone might miss.

Few title matches in the top 10. When few or none of the top 10 results have the phrase in their name, most of them are ranking on partial matches and other signals rather than targeting it. As the table above shows, that is the norm for multi-word phrases, which is exactly why a deliberate title match can stand out.

Top apps have low rating counts. If the top results have 50–500 ratings instead of 50,000–500,000, you're looking at a field you can join. Rating counts tell you how heavy the field is, not who wins it: in Sonar's data, #1 out-rated #2 only about half the time. Look for the weakest app in the top 10, not just the average.

Mixed quality in top results. Check when the top-ranking apps were last updated. If you see apps that haven't been updated in 18+ months, apps rated below 4.0, or apps that don't clearly serve the search intent, a well-made app can enter and climb.

Low title match ratio + low rating counts = the clearest signal that a keyword is genuinely low competition, regardless of what any single score says. For a deeper look at what the difficulty score measures, see how Sonar's keyword scores work.

Five strategies to find low-competition keywords

1. Autocomplete mining

Open the App Store or Google Play and start typing partial phrases related to your app. The suggestions are real queries, and because almost every long-tail phrase reads Apple's popularity floor, showing up in autocomplete is often the best demand evidence you'll get.

Go beyond the obvious. Don't just type "budget." Type "budget t," "budget f," "budget pl." Each additional character surfaces different long-tail variations. Here is how a few budget phrases scored in Sonar for the US App Store on October 1, 2026:

The longer phrases were 7 to 28 points easier than the head term, and all of them read the popularity floor. That is the usual trade: less competition, less measurable demand, and a clearer intent. Someone typing "budget tracker for couples" knows what they want, which tends to mean a better tap-to-install rate.

Sonar's keyword generator automates this by running hundreds of prefix combinations and returning results with difficulty and popularity attached.

2. Competitor keyword gaps

Your competitors have already done some of the research. Look at keywords where competing apps rank in positions 5–20. These are keywords where the competitor has some relevance but hasn't fully optimized for them. If their app sits at position 12 without the keyword in its title, you can often outrank it by targeting the keyword directly.

The process:

1. Identify 3–5 competitor apps in your niche
2. Look at which keywords they rank for outside the top 5
3. Check difficulty on those keywords and look at the weakest app in each top 10
4. Ask: is this keyword relevant to my app? If yes, it's a candidate

This works especially well against large, unfocused apps. A do-everything productivity app might rank #15 for "pomodoro timer for studying" without targeting it. A focused pomodoro app can take the top spot.

3. Category + modifier combinations

Take your core keyword and add a modifier that narrows the audience:

• Audience modifiers: "for students," "for freelancers," "for couples," "for seniors," "for kids"
• Style modifiers: "simple," "minimal," "aesthetic," "fast," "offline," "private"
• Use-case modifiers: "with reminders," "with widgets," "with sync," "no login," "no ads"

Modifiers help, but less than most guides suggest. Five pairs from Sonar's US App Store data, October 1, 2026:

The modifier lowered difficulty in four of the five pairs, by 3 to 23 points, and none of the modified phrases reached the easy range. "Meditation for sleep" scored the same 79 as "meditation app", because the big meditation apps rank for both. So a modifier is a way to find candidates, not a shortcut past checking them.

The modifier still earns its place on conversion. Someone searching "calorie counter simple" is actively rejecting the feature-heavy apps that dominate "calorie counter". If that's what you built, the phrase describes you better than the head term does.

4. Localized keywords

The US App Store is the most competitive market. The same keyword usually scores lower in other English-speaking storefronts:

Source: Sonar keyword metrics, App Store difficulty, queried 2026-10-01.

All four keywords scored 9 to 28 points lower in each of the three markets. Demand is smaller there too: "budget app" read an Apple popularity of 61 in the US but 36 to 40 in the other three. A keyword you can't crack in the US can still be worth taking in Australia.

This isn't about translating keywords into other languages (though that works too). It's about recognizing that competition varies by country even within one language. Your US metadata can target your most competitive viable keywords while your Australian metadata targets terms you'd never crack in the US. On iOS you set per-country keywords through App Store Connect localizations; on Google Play you can create separate store listings per language and country.

5. Adjacent category keywords

Don't limit yourself to keywords from your app's exact category. Look at how users describe the problem your app solves, even if they'd categorize it differently. A fitness app might look at "wellness journal", "self care tracker" or "morning routine app"; a note-taking app at "writing app", "meeting notes" or "recipe organizer".

Check each one, because adjacent doesn't mean empty. In Sonar's US App Store data on October 1, 2026, those six scored:

Only "recipe organizer" came in under 45. The idea behind the strategy holds, since user intent can overlap even when categories don't, but the adjacent space is often occupied by big apps from the neighbouring category. For a competitive example in the health space, see weight loss app keyword difficulty.

The sweet spot framework

Not all low-difficulty keywords are worth targeting. A keyword with difficulty 5 that nobody searches for is easy to rank for and worth nothing. You need low difficulty and evidence of demand.

Think of it as a two-axis framework:

• High difficulty + high popularity = keywords like "photo editor" and "weather app." You won't rank. Move on.
• High difficulty + low popularity = the worst combination. Hard to rank and low reward. Avoid.
• Low difficulty + low popularity = easy wins with little traffic. Use them to fill your keyword field after your primary terms.
• Low difficulty + high popularity = the sweet spot. Rare, but it exists, especially in emerging niches and in smaller storefronts.

The ideal target is difficulty under 35 with Search Popularity 35–55, which works out to roughly 2,200–7,500 daily impressions on iOS. Sonar's data says to expect few of those: only about 1 in 20 US keywords in our sample read above Apple's popularity floor at all. In practice, most of your targets will be difficulty-under-35 phrases at the floor, chosen because they show up in autocomplete, because competitors rank for them, or because Sonar's proxy estimate separates them from their floored neighbours.

You can check any keyword on Sonar's keyword difficulty page. It shows difficulty, popularity and the full top-10 breakdown so you can verify the opportunity yourself.

Stretching to difficulty 45: check the top three apps

Difficulty under 35 is the default target. Above it, a keyword can still be within reach of a small app, up to about 45, but only when the apps at the top of the results are weak. A difficulty score summarizes the whole top 10, so it can hide a single incumbent you will never move. In this band, the score tells you where to look, and the top three apps tell you whether to commit.

These six keywords from Sonar's index show how far apart two keywords in the same band can be:

Source: Sonar keyword and app search data, US App Store, August 2026.

"Cover letter" scores 21, yet its leading app has about 75,000 reviews. "Plagiarism checker" scores 23, and none of its top three apps has more than 174 reviews (10, 174 and 49), so a new app with strong metadata and a few hundred ratings can compete there. "Packing list" (32) and "tip calculator" (38) sit in the same band, but the top three for packing list hold 2,420 to 7,050 reviews, while tip calculator is led by an app with 60,461. Same band, very different races. Sonar's difficulty breakdown flags this directly: a beatable flag and the position of the weakest app in the top 10.

All five keywords under 45 read Apple's popularity floor of 5, which is normal for the long tail (see "Accept floor popularity" further down). For floored terms, Sonar's proxy estimate still separates them: in the same August 2026 data, tip calculator read 34, packing list 29, plagiarism checker 22 and color picker 21.

Check the other store too. "Tip calculator" scored 38 on iOS but 14 on Google Play in the same pull, while "budget planner" was close on both (63 and 59). If your app is on both stores, choose targets per store rather than reusing the iOS list; our Google Play ASO guide covers what differs.

Worked example: keywords for a meal planner app

Here is the process for a meal planning app, with the numbers Sonar returned for the US App Store on October 1, 2026. "Proxy" is Sonar's own popularity estimate, shown where Apple reports the floor of 5.

Step 1: Check the obvious keywords.

None of these are realistic primary targets for a new app. That's normal.

Step 2: Mine autocomplete for longer phrases.

Longer is not automatically easier. All four read Apple's floor, and three of them still score 60 or more, because the same large meal-planning apps rank for every variation.

Step 3: Check competitor gaps and adjacent terms.

Now we're getting somewhere. "Recipe organizer" is the standout: difficulty 39 with the highest proxy demand of any floored term here. "Recipe calendar" scores 60, but Sonar flags it as beatable because the app ranked #1 had no ratings at all, the kind of opening a difficulty score alone hides.

Step 4: Apply modifiers.

"Family dinner ideas" is easy and thin. The other two modifiers didn't help.

Step 5: Select and place your keywords.

The head term "meal planner" stays out of reach for now, but "meal" and "planner" both appear in the subtitle, so the app is eligible for it once its ratings grow.

On iOS you have 160 indexed characters across title, subtitle and keyword field. Don't repeat words across fields. "Recipe" in your title means you never put it in your keyword field — Apple combines words automatically. See our metadata optimization guide for the full field-by-field breakdown.

All relevant keywords are high difficulty — what's the move?

Go one level down. If every head term in your niche reads difficulty 70+, the winnable keywords are the longer phrases that pair your niche with a use case, an audience or a feature, and the terms competitors rank for without targeting. If even those are crowded, your app is positioned in too broad a niche for its current ratings, and the fix is a narrower position, not a better keyword.

Take a road-trip planner, the example from a much-discussed r/AppStoreOptimization thread. "Road trip planner" is a head term owned by big travel apps. Phrases like "rv trip planner", "road trip games for kids" or "ev route planner" each describe a narrower job, and a focused app can be the best result for one of them.

Three moves, in order:

1. Mine competitor gaps. Strategy 2 above: terms where competitors sit at positions 5–20 without the phrase in their title. Sonar's keyword gap analysis lists the terms each tracked competitor ranks for that you don't, with their position.
2. Accept floor popularity. Long-tail phrases usually read Apple's popularity floor of 5; among keywords Sonar users track, 94.9% do (October 2026). A 5 means "below Apple's reporting cutoff", not "nobody searches". Check autocomplete and who ranks before you drop a term (see is keyword popularity 5 a no-go?).
3. Read difficulty against your own app. A difficulty score describes the strength of the current top 10. If your app has 40 ratings and the top 10 averages thousands, wait. If you're in the same range, a 60 might be winnable.

When the only reachable terms describe a different job than your title does, that's the signal to reposition: retitle around the sub-niche you can win, then expand once you rank there.

Tracking results

After you ship new metadata, track rankings daily for the first two weeks. Here is what Sonar's rank history says about the timing.

New rankings arrive fast on iOS, slower on Google Play. We looked at 335 iOS and 249 Google Play app updates between May and September 2026, each with no other update within two weeks, and counted the days on which an app started ranking (top 200) for a tracked keyword it hadn't ranked for in the previous week. On iOS, those new rankings jumped to 2.5 times their normal daily rate on the first daily check after the update went live, and kept coming at a slightly raised rate for about two weeks. On Google Play there was no same-day jump; new rankings were spread over roughly the first one to one and a half weeks.

Two caveats. This times new rankings after any update, not specifically after a keyword change (Sonar doesn't keep a history of titles and subtitles), and updates are detected about once a day, so "the first check" can be up to a day after the version went live.

Don't count on a launch bump. For 34 iOS apps that Sonar tracked from launch (released March–July 2026), the median rank on each app's five best non-brand keywords was flat over the first eight weeks, and about a quarter of them slipped 10+ places, against about 1 in 8 established small apps. The sample is small, and this covers keyword ranks only, not downloads or featuring, so it doesn't prove there's no launch effect. It does mean your keyword choices have to work without one.

The 6-week rule. Most new rankings land within two weeks, so give any keyword set about 6 weeks before deciding it's not working. That leaves a full month to see where positions settle. Changing your metadata every week mixes the effects of several changes and leaves you guessing which one worked.

When to iterate: if a keyword hasn't cracked the top 30 after 6 weeks, it's either too competitive for your app's current ratings or not relevant enough in the store's assessment. Swap it out. If a keyword sits at positions 5–10 and isn't climbing, work on conversion and ratings rather than changing keywords.

The takeaway

Finding low-competition keywords isn't about finding obscure terms nobody searches for. It's about finding the gap between what users search for and what existing apps target. Sonar's data puts numbers on that gap: two-thirds of US App Store top 10s have no app with the exact phrase in its name, about one in six is led by an app with under 100 ratings, and the same keyword often scores very differently on the other store or in another country.

Start with 8–12 keywords under difficulty 35 that show some evidence of demand, place them carefully, and track rankings daily. After 6 weeks, cut what isn't working and add new candidates. This cycle, repeated every 4–6 weeks, is how indie apps build organic traffic without spending on ads.

FAQ

Can a new app rank for a keyword at difficulty 35–40?

Yes, when the top of the results is weak. At 35–40 the deciding factor is the top three apps, not the score: "packing list" (difficulty 32) has no top-three app above 7,050 reviews, while "tip calculator" (difficulty 38) is led by an app with 60,461. Open the results, compare their review counts with yours, and look for a low-review or long-unupdated app in the top 10. If there is one, a well-targeted title can take its spot. If every top app has tens of thousands of reviews, pick a longer variant of the keyword instead.

Is a keyword with popularity 5 worth targeting?

Often, yes. 98% of the 1.67 million iOS keywords Sonar has an Apple popularity reading for sit at the floor of 5, including most of the long-tail phrases small apps can win. Apple's 5 means "below the reporting cutoff". Use autocomplete, competitor rankings and Sonar's proxy estimate to tell floored keywords apart.

Is the same keyword easier on Google Play?

Sometimes. For 3,510 US keywords measured on both stores, Sonar rated Google Play slightly easier at the median (56 vs 60 on the App Store), and a third of the keywords were 10+ points easier there. Across 71 storefronts the median flipped: the typical keyword scored 6 points higher on Google Play. Check each keyword on each store before reusing a target list.