Free ASO Keyword Tools That Are Actually Free (2026)

What “free” means in each tool

The three bolded rows are the ones that are free forever rather than free for a week. Everything a paid iOS tool sells you is derived from the first of them, with a difficulty score and a nicer chart layered on top. That layer is worth money once you’re managing a portfolio. For a first app it is not.

The one people miss: Apple Search Ads Keyword Planner

Apple gives away keyword popularity data through its ads product. You sign up for Apple Search Ads with your Apple developer account, open the keyword planner, and search a term. You get Apple’s own popularity index on a 5–100 scale plus a list of related terms — the actual source data, not a third-party estimate of it.

You do not have to run an ad. You do not have to spend anything. The account exists, the planner is inside it, and nothing charges you until you create and enable a campaign. This is the closest thing to a real free ASO keyword tool that exists for iOS, and it’s the reason most “free tier” ASO products feel thin — they’re reselling a number you can read yourself.

Two things it will not tell you: how hard a term is to rank for, and what the trend has been. Difficulty you can approximate by hand — search the term and look at whether the top five results are apps with brand budgets or apps like yours. Trend you mostly do not need before launch.

Android has no equivalent, so use autocomplete properly

Google publishes no keyword volume for Play. What it does publish, implicitly, is the autocomplete ordering: type a partial query into Play search and the suggestions come back roughly ranked by demand. That is a usable signal if you harvest it systematically rather than eyeballing it once.

Take your core noun and append each letter of the alphabet — habit a, habit b, and so on — recording every suggestion. Twenty-six queries gives you a few hundred real phrases people type, ordered by popularity, for free. Do it in an incognito session or a fresh device so your own search history doesn’t skew the list.

Our app store keyword tool runs that expansion for you and groups the results, which saves the twenty-six manual searches. It is free and there is no account.

Competitor listings are a free keyword database

Paid tools charge for “competitor keyword extraction.” The underlying material is a public app listing. For each of your seed terms, open the top five results and read the title, the subtitle, and the first two lines of the description. Terms that appear in three or more competitors are terms those teams have already tested and kept.

Pay attention to what they stoppedsaying too. An app whose title used to carry a category word and now leads with a benefit usually moved because the category word wasn’t converting. You can see this in the version history on the listing page.

The free workflow, start to finish

1. Seed. Write down the five nouns and verbs someone would use to describe your app to a friend. Not your product name — the job.
2. Expand.Run each seed through both store autocompletes with the alphabet trick. You should end up with 150–400 raw phrases.
3. Score. Paste the survivors into Apple Search Ads Keyword Planner in batches and record the popularity index for each.
4. Filter.Drop anything under ~10. Flag anything over ~50 as aspirational. Your working set is the 15–35 band, sorted by how honestly it describes the app.
5. Place. Best two or three terms go in the iOS title and subtitle. The rest fill the 30-character keyword field, comma-separated, no spaces, no plurals of words you already used. For Play, work them into the long description as sentences a person would actually read.
6. Measure. Two weeks after launch, open the search-term reports in App Store Connect and Google Play Console. Those are your terms, observed rather than guessed, and they beat every tool on this page.

Step six is the one that matters and the one nobody does. A paid ASO subscription bought before launch is money spent on estimates when the real numbers arrive free a fortnight later.

When a paid tool is worth it

Three situations justify the subscription. You run more than about five apps and manual harvesting stops scaling. You need daily rank tracking because you’re running paid acquisition and want to separate organic movement from bought installs. Or you’re localizing into eight or more languages, where the per-market keyword work genuinely is a full-time job.

One app, pre-launch, no ad budget: the free stack is not a compromise. It is the same data with more typing.

Keywords are downstream of having something to list

The ordering trap in ASO is spending a week on keyword research for an app that doesn’t exist yet. Popularity scores tell you what people search for; they cannot tell you whether the thing you build will hold anyone’s attention past day three. Ship something small, read your own search-term report, and let the observed terms rewrite your listing.

If getting to a listing is the bottleneck, describe the app in a sentence at ShipNative and have a real React Native build running on your phone in minutes. Then do the keyword work against a product you can actually see, and read the App Store submission walkthrough when you’re ready to file it.

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Describe your app in one sentence and have it running on your phone in minutes at shipnative.dev. No credit card, full React Native source export whenever you want it.