Safari does not show up in the spotlight search when not a default browser.

Wow, very fortunate that I thought to search for this issue again due to frustration, rather than giving up.

sudo mdutil -i on /System/Volumes/Preboot

That command fixed the issue for me too, and Safari is now back in Spotlight after not showing up for weeks.

To @ben_ritchie and others asking, why does this work?

I believe attempting to fix this by adding /Applications to Spotlight didn't work because Spotlight is not following the symlink to /System/Cryptexes/ where the Safari.app file actually is.

What is this mysterious Cryptexes volume that Safari sits in? My best guess is that it's used when starting up your Mac to display your login screen. If you use Guest mode instead of logging in, it launches Safari without exposing the rest of your encrypted hard drive.

Why did it disappear in the first place?

I'm not sure, but in my case at some point I added /Volumes/ to the list of restricted Spotlight locations. I think it's possible that removed the Spotlight cache of the Preboot volume, losing Safari in Spotlight as a side effect, and there was no automatic process to bring it back.

I was able to get Safari to appear in the Spotlight results again by setting "Default Web Browser" (in Settings -> Desktop and Dock) to Safari.app.

This confirms that this is definitely a bug in Spotlight on OS X Ventura 13.2.1. It is present in March 2023. Hopefully it will be fixed.

The bug is: When SAFARI is not the default browser, it can be the case (under unknown circumstances) that typing "Safari" in spotlight either 1) does not show the Safari.app or 2) may even link to a DIFFERENT browser.

Image attached.

When I change the browser back to Chrome, then I have a strange search result: I type "Safari," and "Safari" shows up in Spotlight, but it shows up with the Chrome icon and Chrome is actually what is launched (!).

Hey there arjun_1,

We'd like to confirm more details to better understand what's happening, along with ruling out some possible causes:

1. Upon putting in the same search 'safari - show more' you did within spotlight on our own Mac, it also doesn't show the Safari app, but it does show when we search for 'safari' within spotlight. What exactly occurs when you only search for 'safari' without any extra words on your own Mac?
2. If it still doesn't show the Safari app in the list after searching for only 'safari', we wanted to ask when did this start?
3. Sometimes unexpected behavior can be resolved with a restart. Check out the section ‘Restart your Mac' here: Shut down or restart your Mac
4. We see you have macOS 13.2 installed, but the latest version is macOS 13.2.1. You can verify this by clicking on the Apple logo at the top left corner of the screen, then on ‘About This Mac’. In case you needed it, this link shows how to first back up, then Update macOS on Mac.

Cheers!

Hey arjun_1,

Thank you for that info. We would next suggest that you rebuild the Spotlight index. This article contains the steps on how to do that: Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

Rebuild the Spotlight index

"macOS Ventura or later

1. Choose Apple menu  > System Settings.
2. Click Siri & Spotlight in the sidebar, then scroll down and click Spotlight Privacy on the right.
3. Drag the disk or folder that you want to index again to the list of locations that Spotlight is prevented from searching. Or click the add button (+) and select the disk or folder to add.*
4. 
5. 
   
6. From the same list of locations, select the disk or folder that you just added. Then click the remove button (–) to remove it from the list.
7. Click Done, then quit System Settings. Spotlight will reindex the contents of the disk or folder. This can take some time, depending on the amount of information being indexed."

Let us know how it goes.

Cheers.

Hello! I am seeing this same problem, as reported.

Rebuilding the spotlight index does NOT fix this issue. (Either by dragging the drive to Privacy and removing it, or by running "sudo mdutil -E /" to rebuild the index).

Only Safari is affected. All other built-in applications are not affected.

This is 99.99% definitely an OS X Ventura spotlight bug.

Another user reported this same issue in Spotlight Search Problem - Apple Community (253659510).

Surprisingly, that issue is from all the way back in February 2022. It appears to be the same exact issue, where ONLY Safari is affected.

(Note that rebuilding the spotlight index is NOT important for reproducing this bug, and did not help. There is no solution or workaround to this issue yet, unless you (for some reason) want to switch your default browser back to Safari.)

I have this exact issue. Tried reinstalling 13.2.1 (22D68) from a downloaded installer (2x) but no luck. Full wipe and reinstall is not an option in this case, I don't have the time. I note that of all the apps in /Applications, only Safari is listed as a symlink pointing to ../System/Cryptexes/App/System/Applications/Safari.app

I don't know the significance of that, but I believe it is a strong clue.

This, shockingly, ALSO solved it for me! I don't know how long it took for the indexing to complete, but I ran the command:

sudo mdutil -i on /System/Volumes/Preboot

...last night as mentioned by luckman212 above, and now both Safari and Chrome show up just as expected!

Id like to confirm that Im seeing this as well, Apple M1 Max Ventura 13.0

This fixed it for me (run from Terminal):

sudo mdutil -i on /System/Volumes/Preboot

Thanks for sharing, can you elaborate on what this is doing, obviously a bit scary to run arbitrary commands shared on a forum as root

Sure. The command simply turns indexing ON for the Preboot volume. Run `man mdutil` for more about the command.