ASO Secrets: How Reviews Impact Organic Rankings?

Reviews might be impacting your rankings more than you think.

Metadata (title, subtitle, description) gets all the focus in ASO, but there’s another lever that’s often overlooked: user reviews.

While it’s unofficial & not something we talked about at Apple Search Ads, I’ve recently started noticing apps get indexed for keywords in reviews, even when those keywords aren’t in their metadata.

+ with iOS 18.4 bringing AI-generated review summaries, Apple could start surfacing frequently mentioned terms even more.

A good example?
When Squid Game Season 2 dropped, Roblox’s organic ranking for “Squid Game” spiked in the US (data from MobileAction). Not because they had the keyword in their metadata. Because users kept mentioning it in reviews.

So how to take advantage of this?
– Encourage users to mention key features
– Respond strategically, reinforcing important keywords
– Monitor AI summaries (once live) to see which terms are highlighted

Keen to hear if you’ve seen anything similar?

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