TL;DR: We took 276 of the most-searched US App Store terms and compared their top-10 results today against the same searches five months ago, giving 2,760 ranked slots to account for. Barely more than half held their place. The typical search retained 4 of its previous top ten, and the rest had been replaced. Churn is also wildly uneven by position: the #1 slot is close to frozen, while positions 7–10 are a revolving door where nearly half the occupants climbed in from outside the top 10.
The data comes from our daily SERP crawls of the US App Store, with full top-250 position history across more than a million search terms. Baseline: late February 2026. Endpoint: July 22, 2026. Every figure here is a five-month comparison of the same 276 SERPs; the underlying crawls are the ones our MCP server reads from.
Half the top 10 is new every five months
For every app holding a top-10 slot today on those 276 searches, we looked up where it stood in late February:
| Where today's top-10 result was in February | Share |
|---|---|
| Top 10 on the same search (incl. never moved at all) | 44.5% |
| Ranked 11–250, climbed in since | 26.9% |
| First appeared in the rankings after February | 28.6% |
Some searches kept nothing at all: 16 of the 276 retained one or zero of their former top ten. If you screenshot your category's top results today, five months from now roughly half those apps will have been replaced. That is the baseline churn your ASO works against, on the most valuable real estate in the store.
The #1 slot lives by different rules
Break the same data down by position and the App Store's class system appears:
| Position today | Never moved in 5 months | Was top-10 in Feb | Climbed from 11+ | New to the rankings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 39% | 29% | 7% | 25% |
| #2 | 11% | 41% | 12% | 36% |
| #3 | 6% | 45% | 15% | 34% |
| #4–6 | 1–5% | 34–48% | 20–25% | 30–36% |
| #7–10 | ~0% | 32–37% | 37–47% | 21–26% |
Two very different worlds:
- Seat #1 is close to frozen. On 107 of the 276 searches, the exact same app has sat at the top without moving once for the entire five months. Counting the ones that shuffled within the top 10, nearly half of today's leaders already led in February, and among those that were merely top-10 back then, the median starting slot was #2. The top of an App Store SERP is usually a dominant app that has converted searchers on that query for years, and Apple sees no reason to move it.
- Positions 7–10 are the revolving door. Essentially zero results there have been stable for five months, and close to half arrived from outside the top 10. This is where SERPs actually compete, and where a metadata change can realistically land you.
Where do the new top-10 apps come from?
Among the climbers, apps that were ranked in February but below the top 10, half started from position 20 or better. Ninety percent started inside the top 82. A leap from position 100+ into the top 10 happened in only 8% of climbs.
The top 10 mostly hires from just outside itself. The realistic path onto page one runs through page two, positions 11–30, letting conversion do the rest. Spectacular exceptions are what make news: when a kids app named Keiki jumped from rank 150–250 straight into the top 5 on dozens of searches, it took a hidden keyword-field rewrite, it landed inside a two-week window, and it then had to survive exactly the churn measured here. It did, holding top-5 for three months while its Education grossing rank kept climbing through the summer.
The other 28.6% of today's top-10 slots belong to apps that first appeared in our movement log after February. Most are genuine newcomers to those SERPs, and more than half surfaced back in March and have held a top-10 seat ever since.
Head terms churn harder than long-tail
Splitting the same searches by query length:
| Query length | Today's top 10 that was top-10 in Feb |
|---|---|
| One word | 31% |
| Two words | 48% |
| Three words | 47% |
| Four+ words | 44% |
Single-word head terms are the broadest, most ambiguous, most fought-over queries, and they replaced two-thirds of their top 10 in five months. Multi-word terms held nearly half. If your strategy targets head terms, budget for re-winning them every few months. Long-tail positions are easier to get and demonstrably easier to keep.
What this means for your ASO
- Rankings decay by default. Half the top-10 turns over in five months, whether or not anyone is watching yours.
- Don't budget your effort against #1. The top slot is structurally entrenched, usually on years of accumulated conversion history. The winnable battlefield is 7–10, the revolving door.
- Get to page two first. New top-10 entrants overwhelmingly come from positions 11–30, not from rank 150. Treat position 20 as the staging area, then improve conversion.
- Churn is your opening. The same instability that threatens your rankings evicts your competitors on schedule. On the typical search, six top-10 seats changed hands in five months, and someone takes those seats every time.
- Watch daily, judge weekly. With this much background turnover, a single day's move carries almost no information. Read the trend against the churn baseline instead.
AppSigma tracks your keywords' full top-10 — who entered, who left, and where they came from — every day, for your apps and your competitors'.
Method notes: sample = 276 high-popularity US search terms (junk and duplicate queries filtered out) whose SERPs we have tracked continuously since mid-February 2026, × their current top-10 = 2,760 slots. "Never moved" means no recorded position change between February 19 and July 22. "New to the rankings" means an app's first recorded position on that search came after February, overwhelmingly genuine SERP entrants, though an app that held one position through February before its first move lands in this bucket too. Apps that left the top 250 and never returned are invisible to a backward-looking design. This measures where today's winners came from; the fate of February's losers needs a different study.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a top-10 App Store ranking last?
Longer than a coin flip, shorter than you'd hope: across 276 popular US searches, only 44.5% of today's top-10 results were top-10 on the same search five months earlier, and the median search kept just 4 of its former top ten.
Is the #1 App Store search result stable?
Remarkably so. On 39% of popular searches, the #1 app did not move a single position in five months, and 46% of today's #1 results were already #1 in February. Stability collapses fast below that, with positions 7–10 turning over almost completely.
Where do new top-10 apps come from?
From just outside the door. Among apps that climbed into the top 10, the median starting position was 20, and 90% started inside the top 82. Jumps from position 100 or deeper accounted for only 8% of climbs.
Do head terms or long-tail keywords churn more?
Head terms, clearly. One-word queries kept only 31% of their top-10 over five months, while two- and three-word queries kept close to half. Long-tail rankings are easier to win and easier to keep.