AI apps in store search: where a keyword campaign can start

When we counted how often App Store rankings change for ten keywords over a month, one keyword stood apart. On ai chat, first place changed hands on 11 days out of 30. On eight of the other nine keywords, the same app held first place for the whole month. If you market an AI app, that is the search environment your campaign walks into.

Note. All numbers in this post come from daily snapshots our platform collected for the US App Store and Google Play between September 19 and October 19, 2026, plus a reading of keyword popularity on October 19 and of autocomplete suggestions on October 20. The full method is in our post on how often rankings change.

What the top of ai chat looks like

ai chat has high popularity on the US App Store. Over the month:

• First place changed hands on 11 days out of 30. No other keyword in our sample came close. The next was ai assistant with two changes.
• The list of apps in the top 10 changed on 13 days out of 30. Apps entered and left the top 10 on almost half of the days.
• At least one app moved on 23 days out of 30.

On Google Play the picture was calmer, but ai chat still stood out there: first place changed on 6 days, against 3 for vpn and none for the other keywords we tracked in both stores.

What that means for a campaign

A top that reshuffles this often makes a campaign hard to read. A gain of a few places can be the store reordering the list, and a drop can be the same. Before you judge a campaign on a keyword like this, give it more days and compare a stretch before the start with the days during and after.

It is also the broadest keyword in its category, and on broad terms volume alone often does not buy a position. We saw that in a different category: in our casino campaign, 1,260 installs left the biggest term exactly where it was.

Narrower keywords with demand

Store autocomplete shows how people narrow an AI search. Typing ai chat on the US App Store suggests ai chatbot, ai chat roleplay, ai chat characters, and ai chat assistant, among others. Typing ai alone suggests ai photo generator and ai video generator.

Here is what the popularity index showed for some of them on October 19:

A score of 5 is the bottom of Apple's scale. From the end of September 2025 Apple showed it for many terms that had scored higher before, per ASO.dev, so on October 19 it did not mean nobody searched for them. The same source reports that US scores have been rising again since October 22, 2026, so check the current score before you rule a term out.

A precise keyword also changes who you compete with. An AI app that edits photos meets other photo apps on ai photo editor, and the chatbots stay on ai chat.

How it works on Rankforge

• Check the narrow keywords first. Add them to the free tracker for the countries you care about and see where the app already appears. No card needed.
• Start small. There is no minimum spend, so a first campaign can cover a few narrow keywords at a pace you set per keyword and country.
• The stores differ. On the App Store a campaign can run on live installs, made by people, with ratings added. On Google Play our installs are automated.

A starting plan for an AI app

1. List what the app actually does, in the words a user would type: generate images, edit photos, write texts, answer questions in a specific field.
2. Check autocomplete for each of those words, and note the suggestions that match the app.
3. Search each candidate keyword. Keep the ones where the app already appears. For the ones where it does not, check the listing and start with installs without a keyword.
4. Start the campaign on the narrow keywords, at a pace close to your usual installs.
5. Track daily and judge weekly. Leave ai chat and other broad terms for later, when the app has positions and traffic of its own.