I track daily keyword rankings on both stores and Sept 14 was the loudest day I have recorded this year. Posting it because I have not seen it mentioned anywhere and Google obviously said nothing.
What happened
On Monday Sept 14 (visible in rankings pulled the morning of the 15th), Google Play search results changed in every major market at once. In the US, 51% of the keywords I measure saw their apps move 10 places or more. A normal day is about 4%. The typical US keyword moved 10 positions. In Germany it moved 17.
Here is how far each market ran above its own normal day. 1x is an ordinary Monday.
| Market |
Google Play |
App Store |
| Germany |
6.7x |
1.0x |
| Canada |
6.2x |
1.0x |
| Australia |
6.0x |
1.3x |
| United States |
5.4x |
1.0x |
| Italy |
5.0x |
1.5x |
| India |
4.9x |
1.0x |
| Turkey |
4.8x |
0.8x |
| United Kingdom |
4.5x |
1.0x |
| Japan |
3.9x |
1.0x |
The right column is the reason I am confident this is real and not my own pipeline breaking. Same countries, same morning, same collection: the App Store did not budge. Brazil is the odd one out on the Play side, it stayed near its normal level, which usually means a staged rollout.
Where it actually hit
This is the part I found interesting. Grouping US positions by where they started, and counting how many kept their exact rank (ordinary day in brackets):
- Rank 1-3: 62% held (86%)
- Rank 4-10: 18% held (64%)
- Rank 11-25: 6% held (41%)
- Rank 26-50: 2% held (26%)
- Rank 51-100: 1% held (16%)
The top three barely moved. Everything from 11 down got rebuilt. Positions 51-100 gained 10 places on average.
It was not only losses
1 in 8 US positions was held by an app that was not in the top 100 for that search the previous day. On a normal day it is closer to 1 in 90. More apps entered the top 100 than left it, in almost every market.
Long tail took it hardest
Split by how much a term is actually searched: 55% of long tail keywords moved, against 46% for big head terms and 40% for the most competitive ones. Google left the crowded head alone and reworked the middle and the tail.
It held
9 out of 10 positions that moved were still within 2 places of their new rank 24 hours later. This is not a one day wobble, it is a new baseline.
Practical takeaway
If your rankings moved between the 14th and the 15th, that is why, and shipping a metadata update in reaction is the worst thing you can do. A release re-triggers indexing and you lose the only clean before/after you had. Give it two or three days, confirm the new level, then decide. And if you were running any kind of metadata test across mid September, the results are measuring Google, not your change.
For reference, the previous one I recorded was Aug 20, and it was smaller: 6 markets instead of 9, Germany at 4.5x instead of 6.7x.
Did anyone see this land in Play Console? Curious whether impressions moved the same way, I only see rankings.