Apple Ads intelligence · coming soon
We're building a way to see which Apple Ads keywords and placements competing apps pay for, market by market. It isn't available yet. Join the waitlist and we'll email you when there's something to try.
Not available yet · Free waitlist
How it will work
The planned flow. Details may change before launch.
Optional: connect your Apple Search Ads account to layer own-spend next to competitor data. Competitor intelligence is designed to work standalone.
Pick a competitor and watch their keyword portfolio, placements, and impression share — planned to refresh every four hours.
Turn competitor gaps into bid opportunities. Export the keyword list straight to your ASA campaigns.
Features
What we're building: competitive intelligence, placement-level tracking, and historical data in one dashboard.
Will show 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 — in one view.
Modeled impression share per keyword with confidence markers, so you'll know the difference between a keyword a competitor dominates and one where there's still real room to play.
Will 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.
Will 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.
The plan is to keep history so you can watch competitor strategies evolve: when they added or dropped keywords, how their impression share shifted, and where your own bids fit in the timeline.
Will let you drill into any Apple Ads storefront and plan a global paid rollout by seeing who's bidding on what in Japan, Germany, Brazil, or any target market.
FAQ
No. It is in development and has no release date yet. Join the waitlist on this page and we'll email you when there is something to try. Nothing on this page is part of a current AppDrift plan.
The goal is to show which keywords competing apps pay for in Apple Ads, where their ads appear (Search tab, Today tab, product pages and search suggestions) and how that changes over time, market by market. Details may change before launch.
Not for the competitor view, if it ships as planned. Connecting your own Apple Ads account would add your own spend and results next to it.
We haven't settled the data sources yet, so we can't promise an accuracy figure. Before launch we'll publish how the numbers are estimated, and the product will label estimates as estimates.
Apple Ads recommends keywords for your own campaigns. The planned AppDrift view is about the other side: what competing apps bid on and where their ads show.
Organic keyword rank tracking with difficulty and popularity scores, in 60+ storefronts. Studio adds competitor rank tracking. Free includes five tracked keywords.
In development
Leave your email and we'll tell you when there's something to try.
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 the gap AppDrift Apple Ads Intelligence — now in development — is built to close.
AppDrift will track 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 will show 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'll 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 will break 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 will let 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 will retain 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 has lived only inside enterprise tools priced at $5,000+/month. It isn't live in AppDrift yet — join the waitlist and we'll let you in as soon as it ships.
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 will route paid keyword discoveries into the same keyword workspace, so an insight from your ASA intelligence shows up where your metadata work actually happens.
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.