Apple App Store Keywords: The 100-Character Field Explained (2026)

The Apple App Store keywords field is the most scrutinised 100 characters in all of App Store Connect. It is hidden from users — unlike your title, subtitle, and screenshots, nobody installing your app will ever see it. It has no Google Play equivalent. And it is arguably the single most important field for whether your app appears in search results for the queries you want to own.

This post explains the Apple App Store keywords limit of 100 characters, the rules Apple enforces at submission, the rules Apple enforces at review time, and the character-economy tactics that let you fit more searchable terms than most developers realise is possible. It covers the indexing map most published guides leave out, two worked before-and-after examples, and how to handle localization without blowing your 100-character budget per locale.

If you want to apply every tactic here on the same page, pair it with Push My App’s free keyword character counter, which validates the 100-character limit in real time and flags the most common mistakes as you type. For the broader ASO context, this sits alongside the ASO playbook for indie developers.

What the keywords field actually is

The keywords field is an Apple-only concept. Google Play does not use a dedicated keywords field — it reads the title, short description, and full description directly for ranking. Apple’s model is narrower and more specific.

In App Store Connect, the keywords field lives under App Information → Localized Info → Keywords for each platform and each localization. You enter a single comma-separated string. Apple uses it — together with your title, subtitle, and a few other fields — to decide which queries your app can show up for. The field is never shown to users. It does not appear on the product page, in screenshots, or anywhere inside the app.

Every localization has its own keywords field with its own 100-character budget. English (US), Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and German are four different 100-character strings you write four different times, not one string shared across locales.

You can only update the keywords field when submitting a new version of your app — it is metadata tied to the binary, not a promotional text field you can edit on the fly.

The 100-character limit — what counts

Every character in the field counts toward the 100-character cap, including commas. Apple counts Unicode code points, not bytes — so Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Arabic characters each count as 1, the same as an ASCII letter.

Four things to know about the count:

1. Commas count. Every separator consumes one of your 100 characters.
2. Spaces around commas also count. note, calendar is 14 chars. note,calendar is 13. Never use spaces around commas in the keywords field.
3. Leading and trailing whitespace count. Some developers accidentally paste a trailing space and lose a character to it.
4. Punctuation other than commas is allowed but usually wastes characters. You rarely need a period or hyphen here.

What happens if you go over.App Store Connect refuses to save a keywords field longer than 100 characters. The submit button greys out; you cannot upload a build with an over-budget keywords field. The same applies per localization — each locale’s field must fit independently.

How to count correctly.Paste your string into Push My App’s free keyword character counter, which shows the live character count as you type. It flags three specific problems — over-budget, spaces after commas, and words that also appear in the title or subtitle — in the same pass.

What Apple actually indexes

This is the section most guides leave out, and it is the reason developers waste keyword characters.

Fields Apple indexes for App Store search ranking

• App name (title, 30 characters)
• Subtitle (30 characters)
• Keywords field (100 characters)
• In-app purchase names
• Seller / developer name

Fields Apple does NOT index for ranking

• The full description
• Promotional text
• What’s New / release notes
• Screenshot overlay text
• Preview video captions

This is the single biggest misconception in iOS ASO. Developers migrating from web SEO, or from Google Play ASO, assume Apple reads the description for keywords. It does not. The description is used by users to decide whether to install — it affects conversion, not ranking. Only Google Play indexes the full description for Android search.

The consequence for your keywords field. Because Apple indexes the title, subtitle, and keywords field together, every word you put in the title or subtitle effectively also acts as a keyword. You should not repeat those words in the keywords field. Doing so wastes characters without adding new searchable terms.

Example: if your app is titled Bear — Markdown Notes and your subtitle is Write faster for the web, your app already ranks for bear, markdown, notes, write, faster, and web. Putting any of those in the keywords field accomplishes nothing — you would be spending 30+ precious characters on terms you are already indexed for.

The rules every keyword string has to follow

Apple enforces two sets of rules on the keywords field: submission-time rules (App Store Connect blocks you), and review-time rules (the reviewer rejects you). Here are the ones that matter.

Format rules (submission-time)

• Comma-separated single string.
• No spaces around commas — use note,journal not note, journal.
• Must be 100 characters or fewer per locale.
• No newlines inside the field.

Content rules (review-time)

• No competitor brand names. facebook, instagram, notion, evernote all trigger rejection under App Review Guideline 5.2 (Intellectual Property). See the full App Store rejection reasons index.
• No trademarks you do not own. Celebrity names, sports leagues, music artists, movie titles — same 5.2 rejection.
• No category names. games, productivity, education — you already rank in your App Store category without using those characters.
• No Apple-owned terms. iphone, ipad, mac, airpods, apple watch, app store, ios. Reserved for Apple.
• No duplicates of title/subtitle words. Not a rejection, but wastes characters.

Matching rules (ranking-time) — what is automatic

• Casing. Notes and notes are the same term. Use lowercase.
• Singular / plural. Apple auto-matches base forms. note ranks for both note and notes. Writing both wastes characters.
• Tense variations. English tense variations auto-match. write covers both write and wrote.
• Word order in a query. meditation apps for sleep matches sleep meditation apps. You do not need to rearrange terms.
• Word order in the field. Does not matter. a,b,c ranks the same as c,b,a.

What is not automatic

• Compound words do not auto-match their parts. productivityapp does not match productivity or app.
• Different locales are independent. English keywords do not transfer to Japanese or German search ranking.

Character economy — how to fit more keywords

Seven tactics, each with the characters you save:

1. Singular over plural. note covers both singular and plural. Saves 1–2 characters per word (notes → note). Across 10 keywords, this alone saves 10+ characters.
2. No spaces after commas. note,journal,focus is 18 chars. note, journal, focus is 20. Saves 1 char per separator. Across 10 keywords = 9 chars saved.
3. Skip words already in title or subtitle. The biggest win. If markdown is in your title, removing it from keywords saves 9 characters with zero ranking impact.
4. Short synonyms over long. write (5) instead of writing (7). note (4) instead of notepad (7).
5. Skip conjunctions and articles. The keywords field does not need and, or, for, the, a. Apple’s matching algorithm handles query structure separately.
6. Skip category names. You already rank in your App Store category.
7. Skip Apple terms. Prohibited anyway, but developers still try.

A quick audit. Paste your current keywords string into the free keyword character counter. If you are using all 100 characters, run each word through these checks:

• Is this word also in my title or subtitle? → Remove.
• Is this the plural form of another word already in my string? → Remove.
• Is this a category, a brand name, or an Apple term? → Remove.

Most keyword strings lose 15–25 characters to this audit without losing a single searchable term. That is 15–25 characters you can now spend on new, non-redundant keywords.

Worked examples

Two real-world examples with annotated before and after.

Example 1 — a markdown notes app

App title: Bear — Markdown Notes (21 chars)
Subtitle: Write faster for the web (25 chars)

Bad keywords string (104 chars, over budget, heavy duplication):

notes, note, writing, write, markdown, journal, journals, productive, productivity, focused, focus, web

Problems: over the 100-char limit, spaces after commas, duplicates notes, markdown, write, web from the title/subtitle, writes both notes and note, writes both focused and focus, writes both productive and productivity.

Good keywords string (96 chars, no duplication, no auto-matched plurals):

journal,productive,draft,todo,outline,diary,essay,research,bullet,tasks,scratchpad,idea

Every word is net-new. Apple ranks the app for notes, markdown, write, web from the title/subtitle plus all 12 words above — about 18 searchable terms from 96 characters of keywords plus the 46 characters of title + subtitle.

Example 2 — a meditation app

App title: Calm — Meditation (17 chars)
Subtitle: Sleep, focus, breathe (21 chars)

Bad keywords string (92 chars, but full of rule violations):

meditation,calm,meditate,mindfulness,relaxation,headspace,insight timer,yoga,games,health

Problems: meditation and calm are in the title (duplicates); meditate is auto-matched by Apple to meditation; headspace and insight timer are competitor brand names (rejected under 5.2); games and health are category names.

Good keywords string (94 chars):

mindful,relax,anxiety,stress,therapy,wellness,calmness,guided,breath,zen,buddha,moment,rest,peaceful

Every word is net-new, none are competitor or Apple terms, none are auto-matched plurals of another word in the string.

Localization — 100 characters per locale

Each localization gets its own independent 100-character keywords field. Apple counts Unicode code points, not bytes, so each Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Arabic character consumes 1 character of your budget — the same as one Latin letter.

The mistake most indies make: run the English keywords through Google Translate, paste into the Japanese field, ship. This produces a grammatical string that does not rank. Japanese users do not search using English-word-translations; they search using Japanese terms that emerged from Japanese linguistic and cultural context. The top-searched productivity keyword in Japan is not a translation of task — it is the transliterated todo.

What to do instead. Research keywords per locale. Check what competing apps rank for in each locale. Use a tool that regenerates keywords per locale rather than translating them.

Push My App’s 14-language translator that re-optimizes keywords per locale handles this in one pass — each translation passes through a locale-specific keyword regeneration step that re-picks the ranking keywords for the target market instead of translating the English ones. Localization is the single biggest lever indie apps underuse; the ASO playbook for indie developers covers why.

Using the keyword character counter

Push My App’s free keyword character counter checks every Apple and Google Play metadata field against the current store limits: title, subtitle, keywords field (100), promotional text (170), short description (80), and full description.

For the Apple keywords field specifically, it flags the three most expensive mistakes — over-character-limit strings, trailing whitespace, and spaces after commas. Pair it with the subtitle helper so your subtitle and keyword field together cover the maximum number of searchable terms, and grab the free ASO pre-submission checklist to run the rest of the metadata sweep before you ship.

Frequently asked questions