Questions to ask any ASO tool, and how ersASO answers them
Questions that separate a measurement from a guess, with ersASO's own answers and the cases where another tool will suit you better.
Why these questions
Every ASO tool for Google Play estimates the same two things: how often a term is searched and how hard it is to rank for it. Play publishes neither. Tools differ less in their numbers than in how those numbers are built and shown. These are the questions we would ask before trusting any of them, ours included.
The questions, and our answers
| Question | ersASO |
|---|---|
| Is search volume shown as a number of searches? | No. Popularity is an estimate from 0 to 100, relative to other keywords, and labelled as an estimate on every screen. |
| What happens when there is not enough data? | The cell stays blank. Difficulty, gap and opportunity appear only once enough of the top ten has been read; unknown is never shown as zero. |
| Can you see how a score was built? | Yes. Each score breaks down into its signals and weights, and adjustments such as the long-tail reduction appear as their own line. |
| Does it need Play Console access or an SDK? | Neither. A package name is enough; only public store data is read. |
| How is text in my listing's language read? | By that language's own rules: lowercasing, stemming, stop-words and the harvest alphabet. Accents are kept, and where nothing is known about a language the filter stays empty. |
| Does "top 50" really mean fifty results? | Not always, and we say so. A measurement reads every result Play returned that night: at most fifty, for most terms twenty to thirty. A missing app is "not in the results", not "outside the top 50". |
| Does it write to Play or keep a copy of my listing? | No. The live listing is shown read-only and AI drafts are not saved. |
| Whose AI does it use? | Yours, if you add a Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT key. Everything else works without one, and AI can be switched off for the whole workspace. |
| How does it report its own mistakes? | In dated blog posts with the numbers before and after the fix, and through a flag on every keyword row for a value that looks wrong. |
Where another tool may suit you better
- You need the App Store as well. ersASO covers Google Play only.
- You want download or revenue estimates. We do not make them; ratings and Play's own install bands are shown as measured.
- You want an absolute monthly search count. Play does not publish one, and we would rather show a relative estimate than a number that only looks exact.
- You want conversion data from Play Console. ersASO never reads Console data.
- You need ranks more often than once a night. A keyword added during the day is measured within the hour; after that, nightly.
If none of these rules it out, the free tools need no account: score a live listing, check where you rank for a term, or put your listing next to a competitor's.
Measure instead of guessing
ersASO harvests, scores and tracks keywords in your app's own language, every night. Free plan, no card.
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