Competitor Keyword Extractor
Pull the keywords any competitor is targeting straight out of their visible App Store metadata.
Your competitors have already spent months testing which keywords work — and the results of that testing are published in their listings for anyone who reads them carefully. An app’s name and subtitle are its highest-stakes keyword bets: with 30 characters each, nothing gets in by accident. This extractor pulls a competitor’s visible metadata apart, isolates the meaningful terms, and hands you their apparent keyword strategy in seconds.
Paste a competitor’s App Store link or search for them by name above. Run it on your top three or four rivals and the overlaps between them practically draw your market’s keyword map for you.
How to extract a competitor’s keywords
- 1
Find the competitor by name or paste their App Store URL above.
- 2
Pick the storefront to analyze — competitors often run different keyword strategies per market.
- 3
Review the extracted terms, weighted by placement: words in the name and subtitle are their deliberate priority bets; description terms are supporting context.
- 4
Repeat for several competitors and compare: terms that recur across rivals define the category’s core vocabulary, while terms only one rival uses may be a niche they’ve found — or a mistake they’re making.
- 5
Validate anything you want to borrow with a popularity and difficulty check before it earns space in your own metadata.
What competitor metadata reveals — and what it hides
The visible fields are a graded confession of priorities. The 30-character name carries Apple’s heaviest search weight, so whatever keyword shares it with the brand is the term that competitor most wants to win. The subtitle holds the second tier. The description is subtler: Apple does not index it for search, so keyword-dense descriptions usually reflect a Google Play strategy copied over — or reveal the conversion language the competitor believes sells their app.
One field stays hidden: Apple’s 100-character keyword field is never publicly visible, so no tool can read it directly. What analysis can do is infer it — when a competitor ranks well for a term that appears nowhere in their visible metadata, that term is very likely sitting in their hidden field. Their visible metadata plus their ranking footprint together reconstruct most of the picture.
Turning extraction into strategy, not imitation
The goal is triangulation, not copying. Extract from three or four leading competitors and sort the union of their terms into three groups: consensus keywords everyone targets (you probably must too — this is the category’s table stakes), contested terms only the strongest player can win (avoid until you have the ratings to compete), and gaps — relevant terms with proven demand that nobody in the top results has claimed. The third group is where smaller apps take positions cheaply.
Blind copying also imports your rival’s errors. Competitors keep stale keywords through neglect, chase terms that never converted, and optimize for storefronts you should not prioritize. Every borrowed term should re-earn its place through your own popularity and difficulty checks — treat extraction as hypothesis generation, and your validation as the filter.
Frequently asked questions
Can I see a competitor’s hidden keyword field?
No — Apple’s 100-character keyword field is private and no tool can read it directly. What you can do is infer its contents: when an app ranks for terms absent from its visible name, subtitle, and description, those terms are almost certainly in the hidden field. Visible metadata plus ranking data reconstructs most of the strategy.
Which metadata fields does this tool extract keywords from?
The publicly visible ones: app name, subtitle, and description, with promotional text where present. Terms are weighted by placement, since a keyword in the 30-character name represents a far more deliberate bet than one buried in paragraph six of the description.
Is it legal to analyze a competitor’s App Store keywords?
Yes. App Store listings are public marketing material, and reading them is ordinary competitive research — the same as studying a rival’s website. What Apple’s guidelines prohibit is putting other apps’ trademarked brand names in your own metadata, so analyze freely but don’t stuff competitor brands into your keyword field.
Should I target the same keywords as my biggest competitor?
Selectively. Consensus terms that every strong rival targets usually belong in your set too. But head-to-head on their strongest terms, the app with more ratings and downloads typically wins — so pair a few must-have consensus terms with gap keywords they’ve overlooked, where you can rank without out-muscling anyone.
Why do a competitor’s keywords differ between countries?
Each localization has its own name, subtitle, and keyword field, and serious competitors localize deliberately — different phrasings, sometimes entirely different positioning per market. Extract in each storefront you compete in; their US listing tells you nothing reliable about their Japanese strategy.
See the keywords behind every competitor’s rankings
Appalize goes past visible metadata — it maps which keywords competitors actually rank for, scores each one live, and flags the gaps your app can claim.
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