Do the App Store description and promotional text affect search ranking?

Character limits, and how each is updated

• Description: App Store Connect Help gives a limit of 4000 characters, as plain text with line breaks as needed — HTML isn’t supported. It’s required and can be localized. On when you can change it, Apple’s product page documentation says you can update the description when you submit a new version of your app.
• Promotional text: up to 170 characters, shown above the description (iOS 11 and later). Apple states you can update it at any time without submitting a new version, and suggests using it for the latest news — limited-time sales or upcoming features.

So promotional text is the only one of the two whose copy you can swap without shipping a new version. Apple’s own documentation points the same way: to share important updates more often, use promotional text instead of the description.

Does it skip App Review?

That’s not something we can state. What Apple documents is that no new version submission is required; none of the pages checked — the product page documentation, App Store Connect Help, or the App Review Guidelines — says whether promotional text changes skip App Review. Guideline 2.3 requires “all your app metadata,” including the description, to accurately reflect the app’s core experience. Not needing a new version isn’t the same as being outside review, so it’s safer not to assume the latter.

Do the description and promotional text affect search ranking?

• Promotional text: no. Apple’s product page documentation says promotional text doesn’t affect your app’s search ranking, so it shouldn’t be used to display keywords.
• Description: Apple’s documentation doesn’t say. Apple’s search documentation defines “text relevance” as matches for your app’s title, subtitle, keywords, and primary category; the description isn’t listed. It doesn’t say the description is excluded, either, so “no effect” can’t be asserted. The idea that keywords in the description raise your App Store ranking is widely repeated, but we could not find it backed by Apple’s documentation.

What App Store Connect Help does say is that the description “will be used for web engine search results once you release your app.” That’s about web search engines, not App Store search ranking.

ASO Lens is built on the same footing. Its keyword-coverage logic (src/core/keywords/coverage.ts) builds its dictionary from exactly three fields — title, subtitle, and the keywords field — and the description isn’t one of them. For the fields that do feed search, see how search rank is measured and the subtitle guide.

What they’re actually for: conversion

If neither field is a ranking input you can rely on, their job is to help someone who has already reached your product page decide to download. Apple frames the description as highlighting your app’s features and functionality, and promotional text as the place for the latest news.

Apple says the first sentence of the description is the most important, because it’s what people can read without tapping to read more. Apple’s documentation doesn’t say how many characters appear before that fold.

How ASO Lens evaluates the description

ASO Lens’s scoring (src/core/scoring/rules/conversion.ts) looks at the description’s first 255 characters. A description of 255+ characters whose first 255 characters have under 20% generic words (such as “app,” “free,” “best”) gets the full 10 points; 255+ characters with 20% or more generic words gets 6; 127–254 characters gets 3; anything shorter gets 0.

That 255-character boundary — and the claim in ASO Lens’s recommendation text that few visitors tap “Read More” — is not something Apple states. It’s ASO Lens’s own heuristic, sourced to a third-party ASO writeup (AppFollow). Apple’s documented position stops at “the first sentence matters most”; treat the numbers beyond that as a rule of thumb.

ASO Lens does not score promotional text. Public App Store data (the iTunes Lookup API) doesn’t include it; it’s only available for apps linked through App Store Connect.

Summary

The description allows 4000 characters and promotional text 170, and only promotional text can be updated without a new version. Apple explicitly says promotional text doesn’t affect search ranking; for the description, Apple’s documentation is silent on App Store ranking. Treat both as conversion copy rather than ranking levers — that’s what the verifiable facts support.