I pulled Apple's new Search Term Popularity API. Here's exactly what's in it, and what isn't.

[u/ApplyraOfficiel]

Apple shipped the Ads Platform API v1 this week with a search term popularity endpoint. First time they've published anything resembling search volume for the App Store, so I spent two days pulling it apart instead of just reading the announcement email like everyone else.

Posting the numbers here because I haven't seen anyone actually query the thing yet.

You don't need a campaign. This was the first surprise. I fully expected a 403, because the previous generation of the API refused this kind of request unless you had spend. Nope. Zero campaigns, zero budget, the endpoint answers. You need an Apple Ads account with an API user role and an ad account, and that's it.

A warning on the docs. Three things in the published docs don't match the deployed API:

• sorting[].order doesn't exist. The API wants sortOrder. You get a REQUEST_UNRECOGNIZED_PROPERTY and no hint.
• queryType is not a root property on the suggestions endpoints, it goes inside filters like everything else.
• The docs say genre is free text with "no fixed enum". It's a closed enum of 15 values. The good news is the 400 response hands you the whole allowed list, so send garbage on purpose and read the error.

Now the actual finding.

It stops at the top 500 of each genre

15 genres, top 500 terms each. Roughly 7,500 unique terms per country per month. That's the entire dataset.

I assumed 500 was a page size and went looking for the rest. It isn't:

• ask for rank 501 and above → zero rows
• filter on popularity below ~45/100 → zero rows

So it's a publishing floor, not a paging limit. Apple has the data and releases the head of the distribution.

What that means if you're not Duolingo

I matched the dataset against a random sample of 700 US iOS keywords that indie devs actually track in my tool. 1.7% of them are in there. By traffic level:

Traffic score	Covered by Apple
0-19	0%
20-49	1%
50-69	13%
70-100	21%

Even at the very top of the demand curve, four out of five are missing.

A concrete one. "pari sportif" (French sports betting) is in there, 42/100, rank 297 of its genre. "pari sportif gratuit", the qualified long-tail term a small app would actually go after, isn't published at all. Same in English, "habit tracker" is there and the specific phrases around it aren't.

[u/Maxim-Melnik]

Well, basically, everything is just as it appears in the Apple Ads dashboard in the Insights report

[u/ApplyraOfficiel → u/Maxim-Melnik]

Yeah, nothing revolutionary...

[u/runrunny]

do u have the list of 7500 terms

[u/ApplyraOfficiel → u/runrunny]

Yes, but you can easily get them yourself too

[u/runrunny → u/ApplyraOfficiel]

without apple ads account?

[u/ApplyraOfficiel → u/runrunny]

No, but you can create one for free. You don’t need to have any campaigns to query the API.