Insertion wave
An insertion wave is a burst of new listings placed above existing ones, which pushes every app below down in raw rank though none of them changed. On Oct 8–9, 2026, 410 listings in our listing sample appeared overnight (1,117 store-wide in our Oct 13 analysis), and 24 of them landed in a ChatGPT top-100 list we store.
- Batch listings
- 410Our listing sample
- Landed in a top-100 list
- 24
- When
- Oct 8–9, 2026
- What to use
- Cohort rank
More from our data
Each arrival pushed every app below it down one place in raw rank. One app moving up has the same effect on the apps it passes. In Popular, Google Drive went from #49 to #2 on Oct 9, and 17 of the 18 other apps whose history we store fell exactly one place.
A one-place fall shared by everything below a point is a wave, not a verdict on each app. Cohort rank filters out the arrivals.