App Store Optimisation (ASO) isn’t just a visibility tactic; it’s a full-funnel growth engine. With user acquisition costs rising and both Apple and Google evolving their algorithms towards quality and intent, apps can’t rely on paid channels alone. This is a follow-up webinar to our previous App Store Optimisation fundamentals webinar, which you can find here.
In this webinar hosted by Yodel Mobile and AppFollow, Agency Growth Director, Arazoo Kadir, and ASO Director, Igor Blinov, were joined by Yaroslav Rudnitskiy, Professional Services Manager at AppFollow, to discuss advanced ASO tactics for building a sustainable growth engine in 2026 – from securing feature placements to leveraging AI-driven store updates and sentiment analysis for long-term success.
You can find the full webinar video here on our YouTube channel.
Why ASO has become a full-funnel strategy
Opening the webinar, Arazoo challenged the traditional view of ASO as purely a top-of-funnel tactic, explaining that it now acts as a growth lever across the entire user journey “from impression to activation.”
Every channel whether its paid, organic, or social funnels through the app store listing. That makes ASO the bottleneck and the multiplier for all acquisition efforts. If your listing doesn’t convert, it drags down performance everywhere else.
Strong ASO needs to balance three goals:
- Impression: Boosting discoverability through relevance and freshness.
- Install: Turning store traffic into downloads through value-led creative.
- Activation: Using store surfaces like in-app events to re-engage and drive deeper product usage.
Featuring: the underused growth lever
Featuring on the App Store or Google Play can generate a major surge in high-intent traffic. It’s “one of the fastest organic accelerators available, yet many teams overlook it because they assume it’s out of reach” as Igor described during the webinar.
But featuring isn’t luck it’s preparation.
There are a few steps you can take to increase your chances of getting featured, and our speakers recommended the following approaches:
- Start with product health by fixing crash rates, load times, and negative reviews before pitching.
- Build a clear story that highlights your app’s platform capabilities and design alignment.
- Submit early to give the editorial team at least three weeks to review before a release or event.
- Show social proof through press coverage, awards, and trusted logos to strengthen credibility.
- Localise well with full translations and culturally tuned visuals to boost your chances of being featured.
Apps that maintain strong vitals, tell a platform-aligned story, and align with seasonal or trending topics see the highest success.
Keywords and metadata: expanding visibility through Super-Geos
Igor highlighted how the best-performing ASO strategies in 2026 are built around intent, not volume. “Relevance wins every time, you can’t just chase search traffic, you have to own the intent behind it.”
He then introduced Yodel Mobile’s Super Geo approach, a method for expanding keyword coverage beyond Apple’s 160-character limit. As Igor explained, “Super Geo is just the name that we gave it; it helps you to bypass this limitation of 160 characters. When you submit this version, all of this metadata will be indexed in the US.”
A good keyword optimisation framework should:
- Build an intent-tiered keyword bank.
- Use additional localisations to extend coverage for the same market.
- Track and refine based on impressions, tap-through, and conversion by keyword theme.
- Prune low-value terms regularly.
The key takeaway: balance discoverability with clarity. The users you attract should be the ones most likely to install and stay.
Aligning paid and organic for smarter optimisation
Igor emphasised the growing power of Custom Product Pages (CPPs) on iOS and Custom Store Listings (CSLs) on Google Play, describing them as a vital bridge between acquisition and ASO. “Custom store listings on Google Play and Custom Product Pages on the App Store give you the ability to customise and create a new store listing,” he explained. “You can tailor the messaging for different user types.”
On iOS:
CPPs allow teams to tailor screenshots and promotional text for different audience segments or ad campaigns. You can then link each variant to an Apple Search Ads group to test which message performs best.
On Google Play:
CSLs go even further, letting you adjust almost every store field title, description, and creative. This means you can fully align messaging with Google Ads, influencer campaigns, or even seasonal pushes.
The benefits:
- Higher message-to-market fit.
- Deeper insight into which audiences convert best.
- Richer feedback loops between paid and organic strategy.
AI-driven discovery and sentiment
2026 is shaping up to be the year AI truly reshapes both app stores.
On Google Play, performance signals like Android Vitals now feed directly into visibility. Poor health metrics can suppress your ranking or even surface warnings to users.
On the App Store, AI-generated review summaries are front and centre meaning your public sentiment is distilled into a one-line verdict before a user even scrolls.
“AI isn’t just changing how users find apps,” Igor noted, “it’s changing what they see when they find them.”
The advice:
- Write for humans and machines structured, benefit-led, and free from vague marketing fluff.
- Track AI-extracted entities and make sure your metadata reflects the right themes.
- Monitor review sentiment regularly; it’s now a ranking and conversion factor.
Reviews and ratings: The feedback loop for growth
Ratings and reviews aren’t just a trust signal; they’re also a key ranking input. Yaroslav stressed that large-scale apps need automation and prioritisation to handle volume effectively.
High-quality review management should:
- Tag reviews by theme, severity, and fixability.
- Reply quickly to critical feedback to encourage updated ratings.
- Feed common pain points back into your product and creative testing.
Positive sentiment doesn’t just lift conversion; it also increases the chance of editorial featuring and helps offset algorithmic volatility. As Yaroslav put it, “Your reviews tell the store how healthy your app really is. They’re the heartbeat of your ASO.”
Leveraging in-app events for sustained momentum
In-app events are now a core ASO surface for both stores. They don’t just boost visibility; they can also rank for incremental keywords and drive re-engagement.
Arazoo explained that the best-performing events are strategic, not reactive, and you should tie them to:
- Product milestones (feature launches or updates)
- Seasonal moments
- Trending topics
Each event should be tracked for visibility lift, re-downloads, and revenue impact. Like creative, events work best when tested and iterated regularly.
What’s changing in 2026 and how to prepare
Arazoo closed the session by exploring how you can stay ahead of the evolving app store landscape. One of the biggest shifts is the rise of AI-generated summaries on iOS, which makes managing user sentiment more important than ever. Apps need a proactive approach to capturing positive feedback and addressing friction quickly, as this sentiment will be surfaced directly to potential users.
Organic CPPs are also becoming a key part of audience targeting, allowing teams to tailor storefronts for specific user segments and intents. On Android, creative storytelling continues to expand, with the ability to showcase multiple YouTube videos in a single listing, offering richer demonstrations of features and use cases.
Meanwhile, conversational search and intent-based algorithms are changing how users discover apps, placing greater emphasis on natural-language metadata that mirrors how people actually search. And with cart abandonment nudges now appearing in Google Play, lifecycle marketing is becoming increasingly integrated into the store experience itself.
The takeaways
ASO now powers every stage of app growth from discovery to retention. In 2026, success means treating it as a full-funnel system, not a one-off task.
Teams should focus on balancing visibility and conversion, tailoring strategies for both iOS and Android. Connecting paid and organic efforts through Custom Product Pages and Custom Store Listings creates consistency and sharper insights.
With AI and sentiment shaping how apps are ranked and perceived, proactive review management and structured metadata are now essential. As Yaroslav summed up, “ASO isn’t a checkbox it’s the foundation that powers every other growth channel you invest in.”
