Apple’s Expanded Ad Opportunities for Developers Coming in March

Apple is ready to begin offering app developers an expanded advertising opportunity.

The new service, which allows for increased advertising by App Store developers during user searchers, will be available in March, the company said in a recent update.

“When a user searches on the App Store, your ad can appear at the top of their search results,” Apple said in the update, flagged in a report Sunday (Jan. 25) from Seeking Alpha. “And starting in March 2026, we’ll be introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results.”

The company noted that close to 65% of app downloads in the App Store take place directly right after a search.

“To help give advertisers more opportunities to drive downloads from search results, Apple Ads will introduce additional ads across search queries,” Apple said.

Advertisers won’t need to alter their campaign to qualify for new positions. Their ads will appear in the existing position either at the top of the search results or further down. If they have an active search results campaign, their ads will be automatically eligible for all available positions, though they can’t select or bid for a particular one. From there, these ads are matched to user searches based on relevant keywords.

“If your app isn’t relevant to what the user is searching for, it won’t be displayed — regardless of how much you may be willing to pay,” Apple said. “Apple Ads considers both relevance and bids and doesn’t put apps into auctions if they’re not a good match.”

Apple added that its App Store ecosystem has nearly tripled in the past six years, from $142 billion in 2019 to $406 billion in 2025.

“Small developers in particular have done exceptionally well as their earnings increased by 76% between 2021 and 2024,” the company said.

In other Apple news, the company announced earlier this month that it had formed a partnership with Google, and that the next iteration of Apple’s Foundation Models would be based on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology.

Those models will support new features for Apple Intelligence — the company’s AI system — such as a more personalized version of its AI assistant, the companies said.

Weeks later, Bloomberg News reported that Apple is aiming to increase the capabilities of Siri, transforming the digital assistant into an AI chatbot later this year using a custom model provided by Google.