What is apple-search-ads-conquest?

This project helps app developers run a specific kind of advertising strategy on Apple Search Ads, the ad system that shows sponsored apps at the top of App Store search results. The strategy is called competitor conquesting: you bid on your rivals' brand names so that when someone searches for a competitor, often because they saw that competitor's ad on TikTok or Instagram, your app shows up instead. The project is built to work two ways. It can be used as a skill for Claude Code, the AI coding assistant, where you simply tell it about an app and it researches competitors, builds a list of keywords, sets up the ad campaign, and arranges for daily performance checks on its own. Or it can be run directly as a plain command line tool without any AI involved, using a set of small Node.js scripts. The toolkit itself has no external dependencies, relying only on built-in Node.js features. Setting it up involves creating an Apple Ads API user with admin access, generating a private and public key pair with openssl, and filling in some account details in a configuration file. From there, a discovery script finds your organization ID, and other scripts let you create a new conquest campaign, which starts out paused so you can review it before it goes live, check keyword and campaign status, and run a daily audit of how the campaign is performing. The README stresses a few practical points: your private key and credentials stay on your own machine and are never uploaded anywhere, all budget figures are in whatever currency your Apple Ads account uses, and new campaigns need some time to build a track record before you judge their performance. It also notes that the project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple, and that Apple Ads and Apple Search Ads are Apple's own trademarks. The project is released under the MIT license, which allows free use, including commercial use, as long as the copyright notice is kept.