Reading a listing audit (ASO score) and acting on it

A 0-100 score is only useful if you know which points are cheap to recover. This is how the checks weigh and where to start.

What the score covers

The audit grades the listing's own text and store signals: title length and whether it carries a real keyword, short description use, long description length, keyword density and coverage, screenshot count, rating and ratings count. It does not know your keyword strategy, so a well-written listing for the wrong terms can score high and still miss.

Start with the points you can recover today

Sort checks by points lost. Title and short description fixes are one edit each and carry the most weight. A long description below a few hundred characters gives Play nothing to index; extending it with real sentences about what the app does recovers points and ranks. Screenshots are a conversion fix, not a ranking one, but they are cheap.

What the score cannot tell you

Whether the keywords in the listing are the right ones. That needs measurement: track the terms, see where you rank, and let popularity and difficulty decide which to keep. Run the audit again after each listing change; the score should move with the coverage of your tracked terms, not on its own.

Play policy is a hard limit

No keyword stuffing, no competitor names, no unverifiable claims like "best" or "#1", and hard character limits: 30 for the title, 80 for the short description, 4000 for the long one. A listing that breaks these can be rejected or de-ranked, which no score recovers.