An iOS app gets roughly 160 characters of indexed text that its developer fully controls: a 30-character name, a 30-character subtitle, and a 100-character keyword field. That is the whole budget for telling Apple's search which queries the app belongs in.
The keyword field is the largest of the three and the least looked at. It lives inside App Store Connect, no public Apple API exposes it, and nobody but the developer ever reads it. So its mistakes don't get pointed out — they just sit there, quietly spending characters on nothing, release after release.
Most of those mistakes fall into four patterns, and all four are mechanical enough to check.
The short version
- Spaces after commas. Each one costs a character and indexes nothing.
- Words repeated across fields. A word already in the name or subtitle buys nothing in the keyword field.
- Singular and plural pairs. "habit" and "habits" is one keyword paid for twice.
- Words that carry no search intent. "the", "for", "app", "best" — filler that nobody's query depends on.
Every character recovered from those goes back into words the app isn't reaching yet.
1. Spaces after commas
Apple's guidance is explicit: keywords are "separated by commas and no spaces."
Spaces inside a phrase are fine — real estate is one entry — but the space
after each comma is a character Apple counts against your 100 and does nothing
with.
It is the easiest waste to miss because habit, routine, goal is how everyone
types a list. Ten entries written that way spend nine characters on spacing,
which is roughly one more keyword you could have had.
Write it as habit,routine,goal.
2. Repeating words across fields
Apple indexes the name, subtitle and keyword field together, so a word only needs to appear once across all three. Apple's own reference says as much: your app is already searchable by its name and your company name, "so you shouldn't duplicate these values in the keyword list."
This is also why phrases are usually a poor use of the field. Apple combines
words across fields, so an app with "habit" in its name and "tracker" in its
keyword field already competes for "habit tracker" — neither field needs to
contain the phrase. Writing habit tracker into the keyword field when "Habit
Tracker" is already in the name spends 14 characters to add nothing.
When a word does appear twice, delete it from the keyword field. The name and subtitle are what people see; the keyword field is the only one of the three nobody reads, so it's the one to cut from.
3. Singular and plural pairs
Apple lists "plurals of words that you've already included in singular form"
first among the things to leave out. goal,goals is one keyword paid for
twice.
How far Apple's matching goes beyond plain plurals — "run" and "running", "organize" and "organizer" — isn't documented, and it's easy to over-apply this rule. Our audit only flags the unambiguous case: the same word with and without a trailing "s". Telling you to delete a word that Apple doesn't actually treat as a duplicate would cost you a real keyword, which is worse than missing a bit of waste.
4. Words that carry no search intent
Apple asks you to leave out "names of categories or the word 'app'." The same logic covers a longer list: function words like "the", "for" and "with", and the store furniture that shows up in thousands of app names — "free", "best", "pro", "iphone", "new", this year's number. Nobody's search for a habit tracker succeeds or fails on whether a listing contains "best".
Our audit flags these in the keyword field only, never in the name. A name often reads badly without its "for" or "the", and renaming an app to save three characters isn't advice anyone should take.
A worked example
Here is a made-up habit tracker, Stickwith: Habit Tracker, with the subtitle Build routines, reach goals and a keyword field that looks reasonable at a glance:
habit tracker, habits, routine, routines, goal, goals, daily, the best app for streaks, reminder
That's 96 of 100 characters, and running it through the audit finds 74 of them doing nothing:
- 8 characters of spaces after commas.
- 27 characters repeating words already in the name or subtitle: "habit", "tracker", "routine" and "goal".
- 22 characters on plurals of those same words: "habits", "routines", "goals".
- 17 characters on "the", "best", "app" and "for".
Strip all of that out and what the field actually contributed is three words:
daily,streaks,reminder. That's 22 characters.
With the waste gone, the same budget holds this:
daily,streak,reminder,planner,journal,checklist,mood,water,sleep,focus,self care,discipline
91 characters, no waste flagged, and thirteen indexed words instead of three. Each of the new ones also combines with what the name and subtitle already cover — "habit" plus "journal", "routine" plus "sleep" — so the number of phrases the app can match grows faster than the word count does.
What the freed characters are for
Cleaning the field is only half the job. The other half is deciding what goes into the space, and that's where most keyword advice goes back to guessing.
The better inputs are words the app is genuinely relevant to and that people actually search. Relevance isn't optional — Apple's rules forbid terms that aren't relevant to the app — and demand is what makes a relevant word worth its characters. Why every app has keywords it can win covers how to find terms with real demand and a short enough list of competitors to be worth contesting.
The honest caveats
- This measures waste, not outcomes. A clean keyword field doesn't guarantee a position in any search result. It just means the characters are all working.
- The field is private, so the audit only sees what you paste. Apple publishes an app's name but neither its subtitle nor its keyword field. We audit what you give us and don't store either one.
- Plural detection is deliberately conservative. Apple's matching is undocumented and almost certainly broader than a trailing "s". We would rather under-report waste than tell you to delete a word that was earning its place.
- Stay inside Apple's rules. Competitor app names, other companies' trademarks and irrelevant terms are a common reason for rejection, however much traffic they seem to promise.
- The limit is bytes, not characters. App Store Connect caps the field at 100 bytes. For plain English that's the same thing; accented or non-Latin characters use more than one byte each, so a localized field fills up sooner than its character count suggests.
What to do with this
Search for your app and open its keyword report. At the bottom, Check your metadata takes your subtitle and keyword field, and shows every character the four rules above would recover. It also lists which of the app's candidate terms your current metadata doesn't cover yet.
Related: most apps appear for exactly one App Store search term is what a thin keyword field tends to look like from the outside.