Ratings count and rank: the heaviest app is first less often than you think
Across 2,299 keywords, the app in first place has a higher median ratings count than the rest of the top ten. But the single most-rated app is first on only one keyword in five.
What we measured
For each keyword, the latest crawl of Google Play's results, positions one to ten, and the ratings count of each app from its most recent full listing. Ratings count is the most visible part of an app's weight: it grows with installs and time, and it is hard to fake at scale.
Higher places, heavier apps
| Position | Median ratings count | Apps with a known count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 34,253 | 2,078 of 2,299 |
| 2–3 | 14,938 | 3,912 of 4,598 |
| 4–10 | 7,731 | 12,374 of 15,944 |
The median app in first place has more than four times the ratings of the median app in places four to ten. Medians, not averages: a single app with tens of millions of ratings would pull an average anywhere. Apps whose count we have not read are left out, not counted as zero.
Inside a single keyword
The table mixes keywords. The sharper question is what happens within one result page. We took the 1,486 keywords where the first app and at least eight of the top ten had a known ratings count.
- The first app had at least the top ten's median ratings count on 1,058 of them (71%).
- It was the single most-rated app of the ten on 284 (19%).
- Rank and ratings count moved in the same direction on 75% of keywords, with a median rank correlation of 0.31: a real link, not a strong one.
So weight gets an app into the neighbourhood, and something else decides the order within it. On four keywords in five, an app with fewer ratings than the heaviest one is first. What the data here cannot show is which of the other things it is: relevance of the listing to the term, conversion from that search, recent install speed. Play does not say.
What to do with it
Before chasing a term, put your ratings count next to the median of that term's top ten. If you are in the same range, the listing is what is left to work on, and the result page shows that lighter apps do win. If you are an order of magnitude below, the term is a long-term target, and the way there is ranking on narrower terms first.
Where the numbers come from
ersASO's production database on 29 September 2026: the latest measurement of 2,299 keywords that our users track or discovered, each measured within the previous seven days, almost all of them in a single store and language. The numbers describe these keywords, not Google Play as a whole.
Related guide: Not ranked at all: how far away the first page really is
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