App Store and Google Play ranking: what changed in 2026
Slower App Store reindexing, keyword clusters, rating cleanups, and heavier Google Play reviews: how store promotion changed going into 2026.
Towards the end of 2025 several familiar ways of moving an app up in App Store and Google Play search began to work less well, and rankings themselves got much harder to predict. Below is a rundown of what shifted and how mobile growth teams have changed their approach for 2026.
The short version
This is what we saw in our clients' campaigns. Apple and Google did not announce these changes, and the numbers below come from our tracking.
App Store
- Automated installs move rankings less than they used to, although they still show up in analytics.
- Promotion now works through clusters of related keywords instead of single keywords.
- Rankings refresh less often, and the refresh usually happens for all apps at once.
- Once traffic stops, positions fall faster than before.
Google Play
- Groups of related keywords still outperform isolated keywords, as before.
- The effect still builds up over time, and a visible rise in rankings usually takes 10–14 days.
- Written reviews count toward visibility.
App Store changes
Search rankings
How it worked until autumn 2025.
Up to the autumn of 2025, moving an app up in App Store search was fairly predictable. Developers and ASO teams could climb step by step with live installs and automated installs.
A typical campaign looked like this:
- Teams raised install volume gradually. A smooth curve looked more natural and kept positions more stable.
- Boosts went mostly to high-volume keywords, either to speed up the climb or to lock in a position.
- Positions refreshed within a few days, so a team could check a hypothesis fast and correct course almost immediately.
What changed in October 2025.
The main change hit the way rankings refresh. In our tracking, rankings started updating for many apps at once, roughly every 4–7 days, and search results became far more volatile. Apple has not published anything about this change.
For a later picture, we counted daily snapshots of the US App Store top 10 for ten keywords from September 19 to October 19, 2026: how often App Store rankings change.
Many ASO specialists first took it for one more App Store freeze. As the weeks went by it became clear this was more than a freeze: the slower update cycle stayed.
Refreshes have since moved partway back to the old behavior, but the cycle as a whole is still slower. Often the first visible result now takes up to a week.
Keyword strategy has shifted as well. Campaigns used to concentrate on a handful of priority keywords. In 2026 working on a whole cluster gives much stronger results: traffic is spread more evenly across the keyword set instead of being pushed into one keyword.
Which tools still move rankings
Live installs are still the main tool for App Store search in 2026. They kept moving rankings steadily even while the algorithm was unstable, and by January the App Store had largely settled down again.
Automated installs look weaker than they were. They still appear in analytics and reports, but they move rankings less than live installs do. We are not writing them off, though: for some projects they still work as an extra source of traffic.
Ratings
How it worked until autumn 2025.
Before the autumn of 2025, the large rating cleanups we saw on the App Store came rarely, about once every 4–5 months, and not on any clear schedule. You could usually predict how many ratings would survive and what that would do to the average.
What changed in October 2025.
From October, removals became much more regular. In the campaigns we tracked, low ratings were removed as well as suspicious ones, and the share of submitted ratings that survived stopped being stable or predictable.
By early 2026 things had partly settled. Cleanups never went away completely and purges still happen, and in the campaigns we track, about 10% of submitted ratings or fewer get removed.
How ratings are managed in 2026
On the App Store, ratings that come with live installs are still the main tool for moving an app’s rating.
Timing now matters more for whether those ratings stay. A rating left in the same minute as the install is the kind a cleanup removes first, so ratings on live installs are spread over several days after the install rather than landing all at once.
Google Play changes
Search rankings
The mechanics of Google Play search have not changed in any major way.
The same rule holds: an app ranks higher through groups of related keywords than through keywords taken one by one. A group usually shares a root word, and that shared word helps Google Play see that the queries are related and rank the app across all of them.
Say you are promoting a fitness app. One group could be:
- fitness at home
- fitness plan for women
- fitness for beginners
- daily fitness routine
- fitness with no equipment
Because every query contains “fitness”, Google Play reads them as one cluster, and rankings improve for the whole group.
How installs build up has not changed much either. Positions on Google Play seldom jump overnight, because the effect accumulates. With steady traffic, a visible improvement usually starts 10–14 days after the campaign begins. You can start a campaign for Google Play on the Android installs page.
Ratings
On ratings, Google Play weights the rating it shows towards more recent ratings, so two apps with similar install and rating volumes can show different ratings.
In our campaigns this year, apps with more written reviews moved their rating more than apps with stars alone. We saw a similar shift for a while in 2024, and it faded. This time it looks more lasting.
What works for ratings now
The basics have not moved: installs that come with a rating still shift an app’s score. What we see now is that written reviews carry much of the weight, and a plan built on stars alone moves the rating less than it used to.
The lever that follows from this is getting real users to write. Google Play has an in-app review prompt for exactly that, and Google recommends showing it after a user has experienced enough of the app to give useful feedback, for example after a finished task rather than on first launch. Even a few dozen written reviews can visibly change how a rating moves.
Worth knowing: on Rankforge, ratings come only with live installs on the App Store. Google Play campaigns run on automated installs, and those leave no ratings or reviews.
Where this leaves store promotion
Promotion in both stores became less predictable in 2026 and now depends more on consistent keyword clusters, natural behavior patterns, and the quality of reviews.
On the App Store, the largest change is the move away from pushing isolated keywords towards growing whole clusters.
On Google Play, reviews are one of the ranking factors Google names, next to ratings and downloads.
Across both stores the direction is the same: they judge the quality of the signals they receive more closely, and raw acquisition volume counts for less. Current prices for both stores are on the pricing page.