Track competitor Apple Search Ads keywords, impression share, and placements across 70+ storefronts. Turn their paid strategy into your keyword list — with no guesswork. Currently in development — join the waitlist for early access.
Features
Competitive intelligence, placement-level tracking, and historical data in one dashboard.
See the full paid keyword portfolio of any app on the App Store. Which queries they own, which they're testing, and which they've abandoned — all in one view.
Modeled impression share per keyword with confidence markers. Know the difference between a keyword a competitor dominates and one where there's still real room to play.
Track all four Apple Search Ads placements — Search tab, Today tab, product pages, and search suggestions — so you can see where your category's budget is really going.
Instantly identify the top advertisers in any category or keyword theme. Who's spending, who's new, who's pulling back — ranked by estimated paid reach.
Watch competitor strategies evolve. See when they added or dropped keywords, how their impression share shifted, and where your own bids fit in the timeline.
Drill into any of 70+ Apple Search Ads storefronts. Plan a global paid rollout by seeing exactly who's bidding on what in Japan, Germany, Brazil, or any target market.
How it works
From blind bidding to informed spend in under five minutes.
Optional: connect your Apple Search Ads account to layer own-spend next to competitor data. Competitor intelligence works standalone.
Pick a competitor and watch their keyword portfolio, placements, and impression share update every four hours.
Turn competitor gaps into bid opportunities. Export the keyword list straight to your ASA campaigns.
FAQ
You see which keywords your competitors bid on, what share of impressions they capture, which ad placements they win (Search tab, Today tab, product pages, search suggestions), and how their strategy shifts over time. It's the paid-side counterpart to organic keyword tracking — you can't out-bid what you can't see.
For competitor and category data, no — AppDrift's panels collect impression data across storefronts. For your own performance view, yes: connect your Apple Search Ads account and we layer your spend, impressions, and conversions next to the competitive view.
Impression share estimates are modeled from aggregated panel data and verified against Apple Search Ads' reported numbers where available. Accuracy on head keywords is within ±10%; tail keywords carry wider confidence intervals, and we flag them in the UI so you don't over-interpret.
All four Apple Search Ads placements: Search tab (top of results), Today tab, product pages (ads on competitor listings), and search suggestions (before a user finishes typing). You can filter any view by placement to see where your category's spend is actually concentrated.
Yes. AppDrift supports all Apple Search Ads storefronts and regions. Filter competitor keywords by country to see who's bidding on what in Japan, Germany, Brazil, or any of the 70+ Apple Ads markets — invaluable for planning a global paid rollout.
Apple Search Ads' Recommendations only show you keywords Apple wants you to bid on — the ones with inventory to sell. AppDrift shows you the complete competitive landscape including keywords where your rivals are winning without you being in the auction at all.
Both. Advanced accounts unlock richer data because you can feed your full keyword lists and placements back into AppDrift, but Basic-plan users still get the full competitive intelligence view.
Coming Q3 2026
We're building this with a panel-data partner. Drop your email and we'll let you in as soon as it's ready.
Apple Search Ads is now a billion-dollar channel, and the teams winning on it are the teams who treat it like Google Ads — with competitive keyword data, placement-level analysis, and constant bid optimization. Apple's own Recommendations tool only shows you the keywords Apple wants you to bid on: the ones with inventory to sell. What it doesn't show you is the keyword your closest competitor has quietly owned for six months without you being in the auction. That's where AppDrift Apple Ads Intelligence changes the game.
AppDrift tracks the full paid-keyword portfolio of any app in the App Store. Pick a competitor, see every keyword they bid on, which placements they win (Search tab, Today tab, product pages, search suggestions), what their modeled impression share is, and how their strategy has shifted over time. The same view lets you see which keywords they've abandoned — a leading indicator that a keyword may have become unprofitable and should be approached differently. Pair this with organic keyword tracking and you finally have both halves of the App Store ranking picture.
Most teams report Apple Search Ads performance at the campaign level. That hides a brutal truth: a campaign that looks profitable overall may be subsidized by one placement and bleeding money on another. The Search tab, Today tab, product page ads, and search suggestions each convert at very different rates and carry very different CPAs. AppDrift breaks out impression share, taps, and conversion for each of the four placements so you can find the one that's dragging your numbers down and prune it.
This is also where competitor intelligence gets tactical. A competitor running heavily on product page ads while you're all-in on the Search tab is making a different bet about their brand awareness vs. intent capture. AppDrift's placement view lets you see that bet clearly and decide whether to match them, counter them, or stay out of their way.
A single snapshot of a competitor's paid keyword list is a curiosity. A 12-month time-series of their bids is a playbook. AppDrift retains historical paid data so you can answer questions like: "When did this category's leading advertiser start bidding on this keyword?" and "How quickly did they scale spend once they saw it work?" That's the kind of intelligence that used to live only inside enterprise tools priced at $5,000+/month, and it's now available starting at $9.99.
Paid keyword data is most powerful when it flows directly into your organic strategy. A keyword your competitor is bidding on heavily is almost always a keyword worth targeting organically too — you just need to decide whether to win it with AI-optimized metadata, a Custom Product Page variant targeted at that keyword theme, or both. AppDrift routes paid keyword discoveries into a single keyword workspace so that an insight from your ASA intelligence shows up where your metadata team actually works.
For a deeper read on how Apple Search Ads fits into the full ASO stack, see our guide to the best ASO tools in 2026 and our breakdown of what actually moves App Store rankings. Paid and organic are two sides of the same coin; the teams treating them that way are the ones winning.