How many keywords should you actually track?
Tracking 300 keywords on an app that only has capacity to meaningfully act on 20 of them isn't rigor, it's noise. Here's a rule of thumb by portfolio size.
A tracked-keyword list should be sized to how many keywords you can actually act on, not to a tool's plan limit.
Every ASO tool's pricing page leads with a keyword-count number: 30, 100, 500, 2,500, unlimited. It's easy to treat a bigger number as automatically better research. In practice, tracking more keywords than you can act on just means a longer list you stop reading.
A rule of thumb by app count
- 1 app, pre-launch or early: 20-30 keywords is usually enough. At this stage you're validating which terms are even relevant, not optimizing marginal rank gains.
- 1-2 apps, established: 100-150 keywords per app covers your core terms, a reasonable long-tail set, and headroom to track a few competitor-adjacent terms without the list becoming unmanageable.
- 3-10 apps, a small portfolio: 50-100 keywords per app is more realistic than 100+ across every app; attention is the actual bottleneck at this scale, not tool capacity.
- 10+ apps or an agency managing client apps: keyword count per app usually drops further, with tracking effort concentrated on each app's top 20-30 terms and everything else reviewed less frequently.
Why more tracked keywords isn't automatically better ASO
A tracked keyword only pays off if someone looks at it and, occasionally, acts on it. Past a certain list length, that stops happening: keywords sit in a dashboard nobody opens, rank changes go unnoticed, and the actual signal, which handful of terms are worth a metadata change, gets buried under hundreds of rows that will never change your ranking either way.
A better question than “how many”
Ask instead: of the keywords I'm tracking, how many have I looked at in the last month? If the honest answer is a small fraction of the total, the list is oversized for how it's actually being used, regardless of what a plan technically allows.
See exactly how many keywords each of the 9 tools tracks at every tier in our full ASO tool ranking.
Frequently asked questions
Is tracking more keywords always better for ASO?+
No. A tracked keyword only helps if it gets reviewed and occasionally acted on; past a certain list length, most tools become a long dashboard nobody actually reads.
How many keywords should a solo developer with one app track?+
20-30 for a pre-launch or early app, growing to 100-150 once the app is established and you've validated which terms matter.
Does a bigger keyword-count plan mean a better ASO tool?+
Not on its own. It's more useful to match keyword count to how many terms you can realistically review and act on than to buy the largest plan available.
How many keywords should a 5-10 app portfolio track per app?+
Usually 50-100 per app rather than 100+ across every app; at that scale, attention to act on findings is the real constraint, not tracking capacity.