The 100-character Apple keyword field: a practical guide

July 21, 2026 · 6 min read

Apple's keyword field is tiny, invisible to customers, and easy to fill badly. It should not read like a sentence. It should be a compact map between what your app does and the words a qualified customer might search.

Understand the limit

Apple's product-page guide describes the field as 100 characters. Its App Store Connect reference says up to 100 bytes. Treat 100 bytes as the operational limit, especially in localized fields where one visible character may use more than one byte.

Separate terms with English commas and no spaces after the commas. Spaces belong only inside a phrase when the phrase matters. Apple's example is formatted like Property,House,Real Estate. Read the current product page guide and App Store Connect reference.

What not to spend it on

Apple recommends avoiding:

• Plural forms when the singular is already included
• Category names and the word "app"
• Duplicate words
• Special characters unless they belong to the brand

Your app is already searchable by its app and company names, so do not repeat those. Use the subtitle for a clear customer-facing promise, then use the keyword field to widen relevant vocabulary instead of echoing the same phrase.

Competitor names, unauthorized trademarks, celebrity names, irrelevant terms, and objectionable terms are prohibited. Apple calls improper keyword use a common reason for rejection. Learn the category's language from competitors, but do not paste their brands into your metadata.

Build from search intent

Start with four buckets:

1. Job: What is the person trying to do? Track, plan, scan, study, budget, or schedule.
2. Object: What are they working with? Habits, receipts, meals, invoices, or workouts.
3. Audience: Is the app meaningfully specific to teachers, freelancers, runners, parents, or another group?
4. Differentiator: Is it private, offline, collaborative, automatic, or built for a particular workflow?

Write candidates without watching the counter, then remove anything broad enough to attract the wrong person. A focused term with modest demand is better than a popular term the product cannot satisfy.

What to learn from competitors

• Category words that recur across relevant listings
• Jobs emphasized in screenshot headlines and subtitles
• Phrases customers use in reviews to describe the problem
• Important capabilities competitors fail to name clearly
• Terms that return unrelated apps and should be discarded

The useful thing to borrow is the user's language around the job, not somebody else's identity.

A practical packing method

1. Lock the name and subtitle first. They are visible marketing copy, so keep them natural.
2. Remove covered terms. Delete the app name, company name, and obvious duplicates.
3. Prefer useful roots. Keep the clearest singular form unless a phrase is how people genuinely search.
4. Strip separator spaces. Use budget,expense,receipt, not budget, expense, receipt.
5. Measure bytes. Check each localized field with a byte-aware counter.
6. Read for relevance. Every term must describe the shipped product and the audience you want.

Localize intent, not only words

The field can be localized. Repeating an English list in every storefront ignores local vocabulary and search behavior. Research each locale as its own market, then verify the byte count again. A translated list can overflow even when it looks shorter.

Storeboard writes Apple and Google listing copy inside the stores' hard limits and keeps the visible promise aligned with the screenshot story. Good metadata should be compact, not mysterious.