App Store Optimisation: Custom Product Pages, In-App Events and AI Indexing

App store optimisation used to be keyword fields and screenshot testing. Both still matter and both are now the smaller part of the job. The bigger levers are features most teams have available and never switch on.

What is app store optimisation?

Improving an app''s visibility and conversion inside the App Store and Google Play. It covers keyword placement, visual assets, ratings and retention signals, and increasingly the use of store features such as custom product pages and in-app events that create additional indexed surfaces.

Where keywords live in each store

The two stores work differently and using one approach for both wastes half your opportunity.

Apple gives you a title, a subtitle and a hidden keyword field. The description is not indexed for search at all, which surprises people every time. Do not repeat words across the three fields, since each duplicate wastes limited space.

Google Play indexes the title, short description and full description. Repetition helps to a point and then reads as spam, both to the algorithm and to a human deciding whether to install.

The features that move installs

Custom product pages

Apple allows multiple product page variants with different screenshots and text, each with its own URL. Send paid traffic for a specific feature to a page that leads with that feature. The conversion difference against a generic page is usually the largest single improvement available in ASO, and most apps never create a second variant.

In-app events

Events are discoverable in search and on the store front, giving you an additional indexed surface with its own metadata. They suit anything time-bound: a launch, a challenge, a seasonal offer, a live session. Under-used because most teams think of the store as static.

Screenshot testing

Both stores support experimentation. The first two screenshots carry nearly all the decision weight because they appear in results without a tap. Test the caption text on those two before anything else.

Retention feeds ranking

Both stores weight post-install behaviour. Uninstall rate, retention curves and engagement affect placement, which means an install campaign that drives poorly matched users can lower your ranking despite raising your install count. Matching the promise in your store listing to what the app actually does is a ranking tactic, not just an honesty one.

App content is becoming searchable outside the stores

This is the shift worth preparing for. App content is increasingly surfaced through web search and AI assistants, which means the old wall between app and web discovery is thinning. Three things prepare you: implement deep linking so specific in-app content has an addressable URL, publish web equivalents of your key app content so it is crawlable and quotable, and keep your app description and web positioning consistent so both describe the same product to a model reading either.

Assistants recommending apps read the same public sources they read for anything else. An app with no crawlable web presence is difficult to recommend regardless of how good it is.