What's measured, what's estimated — and what we can't see.
Inside the product, every number carries a label: measured when it comes from real observed data, est when it's a computed estimate. This page is that contract, in plain language — how each number is made, and what ASOon will never pretend to know.
Measured
Real observations — either from Apple's public storefront (no login, the same data a browser sees) or from your own connected Apple account.
Keyword ranks — true App Store search order
Ranks come from the same ordered results Apple's own App Store search returns for a storefront, recorded daily. Not modeled, not sampled from a user panel, not inferred from a third-party database — the actual list, in the actual order. When Apple's native search endpoint can't be read, ASOon skips that day's rank rather than record a relevance-ordered guess — fallback results are never written into rank history or any metric built on it. A gap in history is honest; a pseudo-rank is not.
Share of top-10 slots on your tracked terms
For each keyword you track, ASOon records the top 10 results of that measured search order every day. An app's share of top-10 slots is the number of your tracked keywords where it holds a top-10 slot, divided by the number of tracked keywords measured that day. It is a slot count on your tracked terms — it is not traffic-weighted, it says nothing about download volumes, and it says nothing about keywords you don't track. Only native-search-order captures count toward it; relevance-ordered fallback results are excluded so the metric can't silently mix two different orderings. Until a week of daily captures exists, ASOon says "accruing" instead of showing a fake zero.
Your own downloads & proceeds (App Store Connect)
If you connect App Store Connect, ASOon reads your own daily sales reports — units and proceeds, per country. Two honesty rules: Apple's reports run about a day behind, so anything sized from them is labeled with the days actually observed ("your last N observed days"), never a window that doesn't exist yet; and proceeds are always shown per country in that country's own report currency — never summed across countries, because summing euros and yen without a conversion date would be a made-up number. ASOon says "proceeds" because that is what Apple pays out — not gross sales.
Frozen 14-day verdicts
Every recommendation you mark done becomes a dated experiment, graded from fixed windows anchored to the change date: the rank verdict is the median of days 8–14 after the change (the week a metadata change has had time to propagate — falling out of the rankings counts as a loss, not missing data), and the downloads verdict compares the 7 days after with the 7 days before. Both are computed from history already on disk, so a verdict can never be quietly re-graded against later data. If the windows hold no measurements, the verdict reads "insufficient" — an honest can't-grade, never a guess.
Estimated — and always labeled est
Keyword popularity is a computed estimate built from observable public signals (autocomplete position, result depth, the strength of apps competing on the term) — unless you connect Apple Search Ads, in which case ASOon shows Apple's own popularity value and labels it measured.
Keyword difficulty is always a computed estimate — there is no official difficulty number to measure, from Apple or anyone else.
Wherever an estimate appears — in a table, a chart, or an Action Plan sentence — it carries the est suffix. An estimate presented as a measured number is the one sin this product is built to avoid.
What ASOon cannot see — and never claims
Apple's private metadata. The 100-character keyword field and how Apple weighs an app's description are not public — for your app or anyone else's. ASOon never claims keyword coverage on them, and any tool that reports another app's keyword field is guessing.
Other apps' downloads and proceeds. ASOon never estimates a competitor's sales. Those numbers would be modeled, not measured — and a modeled number presented as fact is exactly what this page exists to rule out. What ASOon shows instead is observable: rating-count velocity, chart trajectory, and share of top-10 slots on your tracked terms.
Absolute search volume. Apple publishes popularity as a relative score, not query counts. ASOon shows the score (or its estimate) and never converts it into invented "searches per month".
Where your data lives is documented just as plainly on the privacy page; what changed and when is on the changelog.
