Megan Dean is Strategic Growth Director at Yodel Mobile, the full-funnel app marketing agency. At Business of Apps London 2026, she made the case for what she calls ASO 3.0: a phase where AI is trickling into every part of app discovery — the assistants, the store algorithms, and the users themselves — and where the job is no longer to rank, but to be chosen by all three.
Key takeaways:
- AI assistants compress the decision funnel by taking over consideration and evaluation, blurring the line between discovery and conversion
- 72% of people have used AI assistants to discover new apps, but only 10% do so routinely — and just 3.7% trust AI tools most when choosing an app
- The app stores still win on trust and usage, and their algorithms are moving heavily towards AI with features like Google’s guided search and Ask Play
- For app-related queries, over 50% of citations in ChatGPT answers point to Apple’s App Store versus 1.3% for Google Play, turning the neglected iOS long description into a real optimization surface
- One Yodel Mobile client saw a 66% increase in installs from ChatGPT after optimizing for AI readability — installs, not mentions
AI ate my funnel
ASO has already been through one structural shift. In what Dean calls ASO 2.0, the lines between UA, product, and ASO blurred as the stores introduced features that touched every part of the funnel. ASO 3.0 is the next one: AI entering every area of marketing, discovery included.
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