Impression Share Rank (Apple Ads)

Impression Share Rank shows where your app places against other advertisers on impression share for a keyword or search term, within the same App Store countries and regions. Where Impression Share tells you how much of a term’s ad inventory you hold, Impression Share Rank tells you how that compares to everyone else competing for it.

A rank of 1 means no other advertiser held more of that keyword’s impression share than you did. Apple introduced the metric under this name in 2026, replacing the metric previously reported as SOV Rank and shown in MobileAction as Rank.

Why does Impression Share Rank matter?

A percentage on its own lacks context. Holding 25% impression share on a keyword means one thing when the nearest competitor holds 8%, and something very different when two competitors hold 30% each.

Rank supplies that context in a single figure, which makes it useful for two jobs in particular: monitoring branded terms, where anything other than rank 1 is worth investigating, and prioritising a large keyword set, where sorting by rank surfaces the terms you are losing faster than reading percentages row by row.

How Impression Share Rank is reported

• Rank is a number. It is displayed as Rank 1, Rank 2, and so on.
• It is reported by ad position. Impression Share Rank (First Ad Position) covers the top ad slot. Impression Share Rank (All Ad Positions) covers any ad slot.
• Data reflects the previous week, matching Impression Share itself.
• Terms without data return N/A, on the same basis as Impression Share.

What changed from SOV Rank

Three things have changed:

• The cap is gone. Rank used to return 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or “greater than 5,” so every advertiser outside the top five looked identical. Impression Share Rank returns an integer, which means a keyword can show Rank 8 or Rank 14, and you can tell the difference between trailing slightly and trailing badly.
• Rank is split by ad position, in line with Impression Share. Before 2026, one rank covered the single ad slot that existed in App Store search results.
• It is available in more places. Rank was previously limited to predefined reports and recommendations. It is now a column at the keyword and search term levels, with its own filters and automation conditions.

The practical effect of the first change is on those filters and conditions. Where they previously offered a fixed list of values to choose from, they now take a number you enter.

Reading rank alongside impression share

The two metrics answer different questions and are most useful together:

• High share, rank 1. You hold the term. Watch for erosion rather than pushing for more.
• High share, rank 2 or lower. The term is contested and somebody is holding more of it than you are.
• Low share, rank 1. Nobody dominates this keyword. Available inventory is going unclaimed, often because few advertisers are bidding.
• Low share, rank 8 or worse. You are a marginal presence on a term with established competitors. Worth deciding whether to invest properly or move on.

Example in practice

A fitness app tracks the keyword “home workout.” Its Impression Share (All Ad Positions) reads 22%, and its Impression Share Rank (All Ad Positions) reads Rank 6.

Under the old metric, that rank would have appeared as “greater than 5,” which is where the analysis would have stopped. Rank 6 says something more precise: five advertisers hold more of this keyword than the app does, and it will take a sustained bid increase rather than a small one to change that. The team can compare it against a second keyword at Rank 2 and put its budget where the gap is closeable.

Key takeaway

Impression Share Rank places your impression share in competitive context, as a plain number rather than a capped value. Read next to Impression Share, it separates keywords you are close to winning from keywords where you are a long way behind.