App Store Keyword Engine

The job: turn your agent into an ASO operator that works from the live App Store, not from vibes.

Most keyword advice fails the same way: somebody guesses what competitors target, stuffs a subtitle, and wonders why impressions never move. This skill makes the agent pull the actual top-ranked apps for every candidate keyword — iTunes Search API, iTunes Lookup, and the apps.apple.com subtitle scrape (with the anchoring trick that stops it grabbing a carousel app's subtitle by mistake, a trap we hit and documented). Then it tallies tokens across the top ten, builds a gap table, and rewrites your Name, Subtitle, and Keywords field character by character.

What's on the tag:

• The brand-defense check that runs before anything else — if your app doesn't rank #1 for its own name, everything downstream changes, and the skill diagnoses which of three root causes you've got.
• The intent-poisoning gate. The most expensive ASO mistake is a Name token that files your app in the wrong category's search results. One documented run caught a productivity app losing to six-figure-review journaling incumbents because of a single word in its Name. The gate catches it in minutes.
• Field-by-field build rules: singular-only keywords (Apple's stemming goes one direction), no token repeated across fields, keyword-first Name ordering for indies, the 250-char description front-load.
• A localization playbook for eight markets with the native head terms most foreign apps never ship — the German and Japanese category terms alone are why localized subtitles are the cheapest ranking win available.
• A rollout playbook that knows the sharp edges: which fields update live without review, and why creating a draft version without a build queued leaves you with a draft you can never delete. That one's from experience.

Who it's issued to: indie iOS developers and small studios whose listings are invisible in search, and anyone who wants quarterly ASO passes to be a one-prompt job instead of an afternoon of tab-juggling.

Why not a free directory download? Free skill files are pattern-matched boilerplate — nobody ran them. This workflow shipped real App Store listings, and every gotcha in it (the subtitle-scrape trap, the undeletable draft, the mid-review rename risk) was paid for on a live app. It's versioned and maintained; when Apple moves a limit or a surface, the skill gets updated and your locker gets the new copy.

Runs on free Apple endpoints. No ASO subscription required.