"We rank 4th for meditation." In which country? That question is not pedantry. App keyword rankings by country are separate measurements, one per storefront, and treating any of them as a global number is the fastest way to make a confident decision that is wrong everywhere except the one market you happened to check.
Every storefront is a separate market
Apple and Google both run per-country storefronts with their own catalogues, their own charts and their own search results. Three things differ between them, and all three matter.
The competitive field. The apps available in Brazil are not the apps available in Japan. Local apps you have never heard of frequently outrank global names in their home market, because they are better suited to it. A term that is brutally contested in the US may be nearly open in Poland.
The language of the query. This is the one that quietly destroys localization efforts. Users do not search in the language of your listing; they search in the words they use. In some markets many users mix English product words with local ones; in others they rarely do. Guessing which is expensive — check the local storefront instead.
The store's own behaviour. Autocomplete returns different completions per storefront. Charts are computed per country. Editorial placement is regional. Even your own listing can differ: Google lets you target countries with custom store listings. The mechanics you are optimising against are locally tuned.
Why a "global rank" is a category error
There is no global search results page on either store, so there is no global rank to have. Any single number presented as one is an aggregation somebody chose — usually an average across whichever countries that tool happened to check.
Averages hide which storefront needs attention. Keep a separate dated result for each store and country rather than combining unlike markets.
If you must summarise across countries, summarise as a distribution — how many storefronts have you in the top 10, top 50, unranked — not as a mean.
How to compare app keyword rankings by country
When you do compare two storefronts, three things must match or the comparison is noise:
Search depth. "Not ranked" from a top-50 check and "not ranked" from a top-200 check are different findings. If your US data goes 200 deep and your German data goes 50 deep, Germany will look worse than it is.
Timing. Stores reindex on their own schedules and competitors ship at different times. Observations taken a week apart are not directly comparable, especially around a seasonal peak in one market and not the other.
The term itself. Comparing your rank for habit tracker in the US against habit tracker in Spain tells you how an English term performs in Spain. That may be exactly what you want to know — or it may be irrelevant, because Spanish users search rutinas and the English term has no volume there. Decide which question you are asking before you read the answer.
Choosing which countries to work
Most teams cannot research forty storefronts properly, and doing forty badly is worse than doing four well. A workable order:
Start where you already have installs. Your own analytics tell you which countries already convert. Those markets have proven product-market fit; improving discovery there compounds immediately.
Add markets where the category is large and the field is thin. A big country where the top five for your main term are weak or absent is a better bet than a bigger country where they are entrenched.
Be honest about language cost. Ranking in a market you cannot support means installs, confusion and one-star reviews. Discovery is not the only thing that has to be localized.
Build the keyword set locally, never by translation
The default failure is: take the US keyword list, run it through a translator, paste it into the localized listing. This produces terms that are grammatically correct and commercially useless, because nobody searches the dictionary translation of a product category — they search the phrase that is idiomatic in their market.
Do this instead:
- Take the concept, not the string. "App that reminds you to drink water."
- In the target storefront, type the local-language prefixes for that concept and record what autocomplete returns, in order. This is the store telling you which phrasings it considers worth suggesting.
- Search the top completions and look at who ranks. Their titles show you the vocabulary that market's successful apps have settled on.
- Test the English term too. In several markets it will outperform the translation, and you need to know that rather than assume it.
Only after that do you decide what goes in the localized title. The same App Store keyword research workflow applies — once per storefront. For the per-storefront field limits and Apple's localization table, see how to localize App Store keywords for other countries.
Record the context or the data rots
Every rank you store should carry its store, country, language, search depth and timestamp — the core rule of keyword rank tracking. It sounds like bookkeeping pedantry until the first time someone asks why the number in the deck does not match the number on screen — and the answer is that one was Germany at depth 50 in August and the other was the US at depth 200 last Tuesday.
The discipline is simple and it is the whole game: a rank without its storefront is not a rank.
A dated keyword observation
On 2026-11-03, ASOClimb checked budget in the US App Store. Budget app - spending tracker was observed at #1. Popularity was 61, difficulty 75, and opportunity 15. These are comparative scores, not a count of searches or a promise of a future rank.
Check budget yourself. Store positions change; keep the country and observation date alongside each result.
