App Store keywords: 100 characters or 100 bytes? What Apple's pages say

Apple gives two answers. Its App Store Connect reference says the keyword field holds "up to 100 bytes of content"; its product page guide for marketers says "Keywords are limited to 100 characters total". In English the two agree, because each letter takes one byte. In Russian, Japanese or Hindi they do not. Fitting 100 bytes is the safe plan.

What Apple's two pages say

Both pages were fetched on 29 October 2026. The App Store Connect reference for platform version information states the keyword field in bytes. The product page guide, written for marketers, states the same field in characters. No other public store field on those reference pages mixes units like this: the keyword field is the only one Apple gives in bytes.

Apple's App Store Connect reference on platform version information says this about Keywords:

"One or more keywords (each greater than two characters) describing your app. You can provide up to 100 bytes of content. Your app is searchable by app name and company name, so you shouldn't duplicate these values in the keyword list. Names of other apps or companies aren't allowed."

Apple's guide to creating your product page says this:

"Keywords are limited to 100 characters total, with terms separated by commas and no spaces. (Note that you can use spaces to separate words within keyword phrases. For example: Property,House,Real Estate.)"

Same field, same day, two units. The rest of the reference page sticks to characters, with one exception that is not a public field:

Field	What Apple's page says	Unit
Keywords	"up to 100 bytes of content"	bytes
Promotional text	"can't be longer than 170 characters"	characters
Description	"Limited to 4000 characters"	characters
What's New	"Limited to 4000 characters"	characters
App Review notes	"up to 4000 bytes"	bytes
Name	"at least two characters and no more than 30 characters"	characters
Subtitle	"This can't be longer than 30 characters"	characters

Name and subtitle come from Apple's separate app information reference. App Review notes go to a reviewer, not to a shopper, so for everything a customer reads, the keyword field stands alone as the one Apple counts in bytes.

Why bytes matter outside English

A byte is not a letter. In UTF-8, the usual way text is stored, a character takes one, two, three or four bytes depending on the script. English letters, digits and the comma take one byte each, so for an English keyword field the two numbers match and the argument never comes up. In Cyrillic, Japanese or Thai, 100 bytes is far less than 100 characters.

Characters	Bytes each	Roughly fits in 100 bytes
English letters, digits, comma	1	100 characters
Accented Latin (é, ü, ø), Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic	2	about 50 characters
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Devanagari	3	33 characters
Most emoji	4	25 characters

Worked out on short fields:

Field	Characters	Bytes
habit,tracker,streak	20	20
привычки,трекер	15	29 (14 letters × 2 + 1 comma)
習慣,記録,目標	8	20 (6 × 3 + 2)

A German field behaves almost like an English one and then loses a byte or two per umlaut. A Russian field runs out at roughly half the characters an English field allows. A Japanese field runs out at about a third. If you write your fields in English first and translate them, the translated field can pass the character count and still be over 100 bytes.

What other guides say

Most guides we read say 100 characters, which matches Apple's product page guide. A few note the split. The two we can point at disagree with each other, and one of them is thirteen years old, which is worth knowing before you plan a field around it.

A June 2013 post by the localization firm iBabbleOn said: "Until recently, Apple had the keyword limit set at 100 bytes" and "Today iTunes Connect will allow 100 characters (including spaces and commas) for any language." That is iBabbleOn's account of the change, written when the field lived in iTunes Connect.

AppLaunchFlow's 2026 metadata reference describes the same contradiction and does not resolve it: "Apple's technical keyword reference says 100 bytes; its marketing guidance says 100 characters." You can read it in AppLaunchFlow's 2026 metadata limits list.

So the honest summary is that the documentation has said both things for over a decade, and none of the pages we read shows which one App Store Connect enforces today.

What we have not tested

We have not tested this in App Store Connect. We have not pasted an over-100-byte Japanese or Russian keyword field into a real app record and watched what the form accepts or rejects, so we will not tell you what happens. Everything above comes from Apple's own two pages and from the arithmetic of UTF-8.

Here is why that gap matters less than it looks. If App Store Connect enforces bytes and you planned for characters, your field is refused or cut when you paste it. If it enforces characters and you planned for bytes, you left some room on the table in two- and three-byte languages. One mistake costs you a refused field; the other costs you a few keywords. Plan for 100 bytes, then look at the field's own counter in App Store Connect when you paste and see how much it says is left.

How to fit a non-Latin keyword field

Write for 100 bytes, not 100 characters, and the field behaves the same in every language you ship. The rules below are Apple's own advice plus the arithmetic. They matter most in Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Hindi, where every character you waste costs two or three bytes instead of one.

• Separate keywords with commas and no spaces. A space costs a byte, the same as a letter.
• Drop any word already in your app name, subtitle or company name. Apple says plainly that "Your app is searchable by app name and company name, so you shouldn't duplicate these values in the keyword list."
• Drop plurals of singulars you already have, category names, the word "app", duplicate words, and characters such as # or @. Apple's product page guide advises against all of them.
• Prefer short words in two- and three-byte scripts. In Japanese, two characters you cut free six bytes, nearly room for one more short term.
• Count before you paste. Our keyword field packer builds a field per localization and shows bytes and characters side by side, and our App Store and Google Play character limits counter covers every other field in the listing.
• Check the counter in App Store Connect when you paste, and keep the byte figure as your plan until you have seen a longer field accepted yourself.

For how to choose the terms in the first place, see our keyword field best practices. For which localizations' keyword fields reach which storefronts, see our cross-localization research.

Questions

Is the App Store keyword field 100 characters or 100 bytes?

Apple's App Store Connect reference says "up to 100 bytes of content" and Apple's product page guide says "Keywords are limited to 100 characters total", both as of 29 October 2026. Write for 100 bytes; in English the two are the same number anyway.

How many Japanese characters fit in the keyword field?

About 33, if the limit is bytes. Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters take three bytes each in UTF-8, so 100 bytes holds roughly 33 of them including the commas. 習慣,記録,目標 is 8 characters and 20 bytes.

How many Russian characters fit in the keyword field?

About 50, if the limit is bytes. Cyrillic letters take two bytes each, commas one. привычки,трекер is 15 characters and 29 bytes: 14 letters at two bytes plus one comma.

Do spaces count against the keyword field?

Yes. A space is one byte, the same as an English letter, which is why Apple's product page guide tells you to keep terms "separated by commas and no spaces". Spaces inside a multi-word phrase are allowed and still cost a byte each.

Does the keyword field limit differ by language?

Apple states one limit for the field and does not list per-language numbers. The difference is in the arithmetic, not the rule: the same 100 bytes holds 100 English letters, about 50 Cyrillic ones, or about 33 Japanese characters.