Watch listing changes

The changes feed is the answer to “what did they change, and when”. It records field level differences between consecutive snapshots for your own apps and for every competitor you track. For your own changes, the card above the feed also shows how your positions moved afterwards.

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Read the changes feed

Each event names the app, the field, the previous value, the new value and the date it was detected. Detection is snapshot based, so the date is when asobeast noticed rather than when the store published. A refresh you trigger yourself narrows that gap. See Import an app.

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Screenshot and caption changes

Three kinds of event describe screenshots. All of them are recorded for your apps and for every competitor. Each listing is compared only with its own previous snapshot, so a market listing’s screenshot and caption changes appear in that market’s timeline and never against the home listing. A reordered or replaced screenshot used to leave no trace, because only the count was compared. Caption events need the screenshot text reader and appear after the snapshot has been read, so they trail the image events by a few minutes. They are skipped when a screenshot of either snapshot could not be read. See Read screenshot captions.

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Measure the impact of a change

A change to your own listing is only worth repeating if it worked. The card at the top of the changes page answers that for each change: how the positions of your tracked keywords and your visibility moved 7, 14 and 28 days later.

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What counts as one change

Every edit asobeast detects on your listing on one UTC day is one change, whatever the fields: a new title and a new subtitle found on the same day are measured together, and the card lists both. Version, price, screenshots, screenshot images, screenshot captions, icon and What’s New count too. The icon counts only when the picture itself changes: the store can reshuffle the icon’s address without changing it, so asobeast downloads both versions and compares the pixels before it records one, whether or not SCREENSHOT_OCR is on. On the App Store a new keyword field only takes effect with a new version, so a version change is where a keyword field edit lands. The dashboard tile counts the same way, once per app per UTC day, for your competitors as well. Competitor changes are never measured here. They stay in the feed below the card.

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How a window is measured

Each change is compared with a baseline: the most recent rank check before the day of the change, at most 3 days before it. Each window then reads the most recent rank check between 2 days before its target date and the target date itself, where the target is the day of the change plus 7, 14 or 28 days. A change with no rank check in the 3 days before it cannot be measured at all, and the card says so instead of showing its windows. That happens to an app imported just before its first change, or after a pause in the daily pipeline.

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Which keywords count

A keyword counts in a window when it was checked on both days, whether or not it was found. A keyword you started tracking after the change has no baseline, so it drops out instead of appearing as a new ranking. Paused keywords and keywords of other markets never count.

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Read the numbers

Holding the popularity weights at the baseline means a weekly rescore between the two dates cannot move the visibility change; only positions do. It is also why the number can differ slightly from the overview chart, which weights each day by the popularity current on that day and covers every active keyword in every market. The formula itself is explained in Visibility.

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When changes overlap

A window lists every later change to your listing that falls inside it, up to the day it was measured. Its effect is then mixed with that later change. Nothing is hidden or discounted: read the two changes together, or wait for a change with a clean window.

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Markets and windows

The report measures one market at a time. It opens on your home storefront; pick another market in the card when the app tracks keywords in more than one. The changes timeline shows one market at a time too: pick the market in the card to read what changed on that storefront’s listings. Market changes are recorded and shown, and never sent as alerts. Changes to a native localization appear on the market’s timeline with the language next to the field, and send no alert either. See Countries and markets. The card follows the window of the changes page, 30, 90 or 365 days, and measures the 12 most recent changes in it. When there are more, it says how many it measured out of how many. Rank checks older than RETENTION_RANKINGS_DAYS (365 days by default) are pruned, so a change older than that cannot be measured.

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Conversion after a change

With a store console connected, each window also reads the store funnel of the market the card shows. It adds up impressions, product page views, Get taps and conversion over the same number of complete days before the change and from the day of the change on, so a 7 day window compares the 7 days before with the 7 days that start on the change. The day of the change counts as after. A Google Play app reads the store listing visitors of every market in its home market, because its listing is one listing worldwide and Google files the countries of a small app under Other, which no market can read. A window whose market the console reported nothing for in the days before the change says there is no console data instead of comparing zeros. The changes timeline marks the day of a change whose 7 day window is measured with its conversion change, for the market the card shows. Without a connection, the card and the timeline look exactly as before, and the report carries no store funnel. The same report is available from the API as GET /apps/{id}/changes/impact with optional days and country parameters (see asobeast API), and to an agent as the change_impact tool (see MCP tool reference).

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Why competitor changes matter most

Your own changes you already know about. A competitor rewriting a title is the interesting row, because it usually precedes a position shift on the keywords that title covers. Pair a competitor change with a position drop on the same keywords and you have the beginning of an explanation. The Action Center formalises this in rank.investigate_drop, which looks for an indexed field change within 14 days of a visibility fall. See Work the Action Center.

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Get notified

Subscribe a channel to metadata.changed. In the default batched delivery mode, owned app changes and competitor changes arrive as two separate reports, so a channel can subscribe to one scope without the other. See Send alerts.

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How long are changes kept?

RETENTION_CHANGE_EVENTS_DAYS defaults to 0, which keeps change events forever. See Configuration reference. That default is deliberate: change history is small, and it is the record you most want years later when explaining a ranking trend.

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Troubleshooting

• A change you made is not listed. No snapshot has been captured since the store published it. Refresh the listing.
• A change appears with no visible difference. Stores sometimes reformat whitespace or punctuation. The diff shows exactly what differed.
• Competitor changes stopped. Confirm the competitor is still tracked and that its listing has not been removed from the storefront.
• Every window says Measurable on a date. The change is recent. The first window arrives a week after it.
• A window says No rank check near a date. The daily pipeline did not check your keywords around that day. See The daily pipeline and rate limits.
• A change is missing from the impact card. It is older than the page window, or at least 12 more recent changes came after it.

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