TL;DR: We matched 5,516 editorial features and 11,524 in-app event starts to the US App Store top-free chart and to keyword positions, between October 2024 and October 2026. Featuring moves one thing we can measure: chart entry. 3.0% of the 2,123 apps that entered the US top 200 had been listed in a story or collection during the previous week, against 0.8% to 1.1% on dates with no entry. It explains about 40 entries in two years. Once an app is on the chart, we see no rank lift after a feature: the median rank change is under one place, and placebo dates show the same. In-app events are weaker: entry rate 3.8% against 2.8% to 3.0%, and keyword positions do not improve (35.3% of event days improve, 39.8% to 43.9% on placebo dates). All of it is the US storefront, and our event data is about 73% complete, so read every number as a lower bound on what Apple does. A tool that says "your feature caused this spike" is guessing.
The data: Apple's editorial items (stories and collections) and in-app events as our crawlers store them, with the daily US top-free chart since July 2024 and daily keyword positions since February 19, 2026 (how our keyword tracking works). All queries ran on a read-only copy of our production database on October 21 and 22, 2026, with bounded date ranges. Test windows that touch a recorded collection incident are left out. The section on data quality below says what that removed.
Apple publishes featuring on weekdays, and most of it is one app at a time
We hold 5,913 editorial items, first crawled in January 2024. In the last 12 months Apple published 2,118: 1,400 single-app stories, 248 collections, 468 "App Event" cards and a few others. The 1,636 stories and collections that list apps name 2,540 distinct apps, and 902 of them appear more than once. One app appears 32 times.
| Item type, last 12 months | Items | Typical size |
|---|---|---|
| Branded story ("App of the Day" style) | 868 | 1 app |
| Other single-app story | 532 | 1 app |
| Collection | 248 | median 10 apps, 90th percentile 26 |
| App Event card | 468 | 1 event |
96% of Branded stories carry a Monday to Friday publish date. If your featuring is not on a weekday, it is probably a collection or something else.
The link from a feature to an app is broken in the usual tables
Each item lists its apps inside its content field. A separate table, editorial_items_related_applications, was meant to hold the same link. It stopped being filled: 923 of 1,462 items published in 2024 have rows there, 150 of 1,512 in 2025, and none of 1,816 in 2026.
This is the likely reason that two tools disagree on whether an app was featured. One reads the stale table, another reads the content. Our own per-app editorial query reads the stale table too, so we did not build a features list on it. The study reads content.
Featuring coincides with chart entry, and with nothing else we can see
First test: take every app-day with an editorial item (publish date), and look at the US top-free overall chart. The window before is the 14 days up to the day, the window after is the day plus 7. As a control, we move the same pairs 30 and 60 days back, to dates where nothing was published for them.
| Group | App-days | On chart after | Entered chart | Same pairs moved back 30 / 60 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collections | 4,194 | 12.9% | 1.4% | 0.8% / 0.4% |
| Single-app stories, not branded | 681 | 18.9% | 3.5% | 1.1% / 0.5% |
| Branded stories | 641 | 3.9% | 0.5% | 0.9% / 0.7% |
"Entered" means off the chart for 14 days, on it within 8. Branded stories go to apps that are not near the chart (3.9% are on it at all), and they show no lift. Collections and other stories double or triple the entry rate. The absolute numbers stay small: 3.5% is 24 of 681.
The reverse view is cleaner. We took 2,123 entries into the top 200 (an app absent for 30 days or more) and asked how many were listed in an editorial item during the 7 days before.
64 of 2,123 (3.01%) did. The same window shifted to dates with no entry gives 0.84% and 1.09%, and 1.42% for the 7 days around 30 days after. So roughly 43 of the 2,123 entries line up with a feature beyond what chance gives, about 2.0%. The other 97% of entries had no editorial item in the week before.
Second test: apps on the chart before and after. We compare the median rank in the 14 days before with the median rank from the publish day through the seventh day after.
| Group | Apps on chart both sides | Rank up 20%+ | Rank down 20%+ | Same, placebo up / down |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collections | 484 | 19.8% | 19.4% | 10.3 to 13.0% / 11.4 to 17.0% |
| Single-app stories, not branded | 105 | 22.9% | 14.3% | 9.0 to 18.5% / 22.4 to 24.4% |
| Branded stories | 22 | 13.6% | 27.3% | 7.4 to 18.8% / 25.9 to 34.4% |
The median rank change is 0.5 places for collections and 0.0 for stories (positive means better). The placebo medians for both groups are between -1.5 and 0.0. The stories row rests on 105 apps and the branded row on 22, so neither can carry a claim alone. We read it as: once an app is ranked, a feature does not show up as a rank change at the scale of a week. For how long ranks hold with no feature at all, see our study of 2,760 top-10 results.
In-app events barely move the chart and do not move keywords
Apple shows events in search and on the product page, not in the editorial team's own stories. We found 96,082 events started in the last 12 months, from 21,967 apps. The median app started 2, the 90th percentile 11, the maximum 168. The top 100 apps account for 6.9% of them. A typical event lasts 21 days (10th percentile 5.5, 90th 31).
Only 291 of those 96,082 events (0.3%) are listed in an editorial "App Event" card. Almost every event is just the app's own event.
We ran the same entry test for the 11,524 app-days with an event start, limited to apps that reached the US top 200 at least once.
| Event kind | App-days | Entry rate | Entry rate on shifted dates (30 / 60 back) |
|---|---|---|---|
| All kinds | 11,524 | 3.8% | 2.8% / 3.0% |
| Premiere | 1,239 | 5.7% | 2.6% / 2.2% |
| Live event | 1,310 | 5.3% | 3.8% / 4.4% |
| Major update | 2,569 | 3.3% | 2.6% / 2.9% |
| Special event | 4,525 | 3.3% | 2.7% / 2.8% |
| Challenge | 702 | 3.7% | 2.9% / 3.1% |
| New season | 1,011 | 3.2% | 2.7% / 2.8% |
Premieres more than double the entry rate and live events add about 1.2 points. The other kinds add 0.4 to 0.7 points. For apps on the chart both before and after, 18.1% gain 20% or more in rank after an event start and 17.3% lose 20% or more. On placebo dates the shares are 16.3% to 16.7% up and 18.1% to 18.7% down.
For keywords we sampled 6,000 events, May to October 2026, and compared the median US position of each keyword in the 7 days before with the 7 days from the start. We kept event days with at least 5 keywords measured on both sides: 744 of them, 59 keywords each on average.
| Window | Event days | Median keyword rank improved | Rank worsened | 60%+ of keywords improved |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real event start | 744 | 35.3% | 63.7% | 20.8% |
| 30 days earlier | 359 | 39.8% | 58.8% | 24.0% |
| 60 days earlier | 410 | 43.9% | 55.4% | 29.3% |
Median keyword rank slips by 1.5 places after the real start and by 1.0 on both control dates. We do not see an event show up as better keyword rank. A new word in the title does show up: in our study of 2,910 title edits a title edit lifted top-250 entry for its new keywords by 6.0 points over four weeks. The control rows have fewer event days and fewer keywords each (12 and 22 against 59), so the rows are not like for like, and we would not read the gap as harm.
What this does not show
- A story can lift downloads without lifting rank. The chart sees downloads relative to 200 other apps. An app at #900 on the chart that doubles its installs never appears. We do not have downloads.
- Publish date is Apple's date. We crawl later than Apple publishes: only 9% to 15% of stories in the busiest months (September 2025, March to May 2026) were first seen within 3 days of their date. The date can also change when Apple edits an item. A shift of one or two days would blur a one-week window slightly. We did not test it.
- The crawl is uneven. The next section lists the gaps. Monthly counts of editorial items inherit them, which is why this post gives no monthly editorial series.
- Only the US, and only top free. Featuring is regional, and a feature in Japan is invisible to a US chart. The editorial items carry no country, so we cannot restrict them.
- Chart presence is a selection. Apps that Apple features are often apps that were about to climb. Entry beside a feature does not show that the feature caused it.
- Keyword positions start February 19, 2026. The 60-day placebo has fewer event days, because many keywords did not yet have a history. The three rows use different samples, and the real row is only a few hundred event days.
Data quality: US only, mostly complete, with one known hole
- Where and since when. Editorial items have been crawled since January 22, 2024 (older items are backfill, back to 2018). Events since November 2023. The US overall top-free chart since July 29, 2024, with 9 missing days out of about 810. Keyword positions begin on February 19, 2026. Editorial items and events carry no country: the crawler reads the US store.
- Events are about 73% complete. On October 20, 2026 we took 40 random apps from the US top-free chart and read the Events shelf on each app's store page. Apple showed 33 current or upcoming events. We held 27, and 24 of them matched, which is 73% recall and 89% precision. The 9 we missed were new ones. A new event reaches us a median 4.0 days after its promotion start, and 13.2 days at the 90th percentile.
- Stories are mostly complete, if you read the right field. The same 40 apps linked to 27 stories. 25 of those stories are in our table (93%), and our
contentfield lists the app for 24 of 27 (89%). The relation table lists it for 4 (15%). - Event intake dropped by about 95% from August 24 to about October 18, 2025. The end date is approximate. We keep a table of such incidents (
collection_incident). It also lists search gaps and degraded days in March to July 2026 and a proxy outage on September 6 to 10, 2026. We dropped every test window that overlaps one of them. That removed 38% of the editorial app-days (8,881 to 5,516), 27% of the chart entries (2,889 to 2,123) and 30% of the event days (16,425 to 11,524). Before the exclusion, the headline numbers were 3.8% against 1.1% for chart entry and 3.7% against 2.7% for events. The direction did not change. - Crawl volume tripled from September 2026. Counts before and after are not comparable. Positions and chart entries are. We did not drop those days.
- What a check against the live store cannot show. 40 apps is a small sample, the live page lists only current and upcoming events, and it does not show events we never saw for apps we do not hold.
Frequently asked questions
Does being featured on the App Store raise your chart rank?
In our data it raises the chance of entering the US top 200, and not much else. 3.0% of chart entries followed a listing in the previous week. On dates with no entry the share was 0.8% to 1.1%. For apps already on the chart, the median rank change in the week after a feature was under one place, the same as on control dates.
Do in-app events improve keyword rankings?
Not in the 744 event days we measured. The median keyword rank improved for 35.3% of them after the event start and for 39.8% to 43.9% on control dates. The median keyword slipped by one to two places either way.
Why do ASO tools disagree on whether an app was featured?
Part of it is the data source. Apple's list of apps in a story is stored in the item's content. A separate relation table that many pipelines use has no rows for items published in 2026 in our copy. A tool that reads the table will miss recent features. We cannot say what each tool reads.
How often does Apple feature apps in the US?
In the last 12 months we saw 868 Branded stories, 532 other single-app stories and 248 collections naming 2,540 distinct apps. 96% of Branded stories were published on a weekday. Counts per month are not reliable in our data, because we crawled some months late.
Check what happened to your own app
AppSigma shows the in-app events of a tracked app and of its saved competitors on Store Activity, with the app's US top-free chart rank in the week before and after each start. It shows context only. Our data says that an event next to a rank move is more often coincidence than cause. Track an app to see it.