The term in the title: what the top ten show
How often does the app in first place have the search term in its title? For one-word terms almost half the time; for three-word phrases, one time in ten.
What we measured
For each keyword, the latest crawl of Google Play's top ten, and each app's current title. A title counts as carrying the term when every word of the term begins a word in the title. That way an inflected form counts (a term word followed by a suffix still matches), word order does not matter, and a word buried inside another word does not count.
The result
| Words in the term | Keywords | Place 1 | Places 2–3 | Places 4–10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 264 | 46.6% | 38.3% | 26.5% |
| 2 | 611 | 26.2% | 13.8% | 8.4% |
| 3 | 923 | 9.8% | 4.1% | 2.4% |
| 4 or more | 501 | 8.8% | 1.8% | 1.9% |
At every length, the higher the place, the more often the title carries the term. For two-word terms the first app has it three times as often as the apps in places four to ten.
What it does not say
This is a correlation. Apps in first place are often the ones that named themselves after their category years ago and have the installs to show for it; the title and the rank may both follow from being the obvious app for the term. The table does not prove that adding a term to a title moves an app up. It is consistent with what the whole industry observes, that Play weighs the title most, and it gives that observation a size.
Long phrases are not won in the title
For three words or more, even the first app rarely has the whole phrase in its title: under one time in ten. On 83% of three-word keywords and 89% of longer ones, none of the top ten does. Those results are won by the words being spread over title, short description and description, by the app's weight, and by relevance. Squeezing a four-word phrase into a 30-character title spends the most valuable field on a term few people type in full.
What to do with it
- Use the title for the one or two words your app most needs to be found by. That is where the table shows the strongest link.
- Pick title words that begin your most wanted phrases, so each phrase has its first word in the strongest field and the rest in the short description.
- Measure after a change: a title edit is exactly the kind of change the rank trend should answer within a couple of weeks.
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: How Google Play search ranks apps, as far as it can be observed
Measure instead of guessing
ersASO harvests, scores and tracks keywords in your app's own language, every night. Free plan, no card.
Create an account