Google Play keywords: simulation, August 2026

Simulation is the deepest category measured so far. A hundred and ten terms survived the gate, a hundred and one are printed, and seventy-four of those score under 30 on Rankgrip — genuinely open, more than in any other August issue. It is also the least borrowed: fifty-nine of its rows appear in no other report this month, where casual manages eight.

Then you look at who holds them.

One app holds twenty-nine of the hundred and one

AIKO: AI Girlfriend 3D Game is the current number one for twenty-nine terms in this report. Add Blush: AI Dating Simulator at nine and Intimate at five and a single product category holds forty-three of the hundred and one open rows.

The scores are real. ai anime girl 3d has a Rankgrip of 7, ai 3d girl an 8, ai girlfriend simulator game escape a 10. Nobody large is contesting them and no app carries the phrase in its title. By every number this report prints, they are the most takeable terms in Play simulation.

They are also a market most studios cannot enter and should not want to. Worth saying out loud, because a reader skimming for the lowest Rankgrip finds this cluster first — and it tells them nothing useful about the simulation genre they actually work in.

Strip the AI companion apps out and the picture changes shape. What remains is india bike game logo at 27, 1 speed keyboard escape roblox at 29, 3d hide and seek painting game at 25, gold merge earn money at 25 — driving, obstacle courses, hidden object, merge. Those are the reachable simulation terms, and there are around sixty of them.

The phrases are long here

Thirty-two of the hundred and one are four words and seventeen are five, with another ten running to six or seven. Two-word phrases account for twelve. No other category this month leans so far into the long tail.

That follows from how people search for simulators. Nobody types "simulator": they type what they want to simulate, and under what conditions. 1 speed keyboard escape candy chocolate is a real query, Rankgrip 9, with a four-month- old app sitting on it. Phrases like that are unappealing to write into a listing. They are also exactly where an unknown app can still be found.

The wall

satisfying tops it again at Rankgrip 80, as it did in puzzle, and merge follows at 74 — one word, held by an app with half a million installs and enough title matches to make the phrase theirs. tricky game brain quiz offline sits at 51 with Brain Test on it at a hundred million installs.

The interesting one is aisle secrets merge the drama offline at 53: six words, plainly a search for one specific game, and walled anyway. Length alone buys you nothing.

What this issue shares

Thirty-three of these rows also appear in the casual report and twelve in puzzle. A keyword takes the categories of the apps holding its top ten, and a merge game listed as both casual and simulation puts its terms in both. Where a row shows up twice, the numbers are the same measurement, not two.

The open terms

Ordered by demand, and every term below is one a Play Store search actually returns. This is app store optimization research measured against the live store rather than estimated: Top 10 is how many of the ten results belong to a developer big enough that outranking them is not a listing problem; titles is how many put the phrase in their app name, which is the single hardest signal to beat. Demand ranks these terms against each other — it is not an estimate of searches per month, and no honest number on this page is.

Each app name is a link, marked , that opens that app's Google Play listing in a new tab — in the country and language this report measured, so every row can be checked against the store itself.