MacOS Spotlight just stop working

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support (CA)

Spotlight seems to have issues with Sequoia for some people.

If Apple's instructions how to rebuild Spotlight index did not help, try this:

Fix for Finder Not Showing Folder Search … - Apple Community

Other Terminal fixes cleaned from the forum (thanks to BDAqua). Please report back what possibly fixes this for you:

Spotlight doesn't find some apps on Mac o… - Apple Community

This Terminal command might work when the GUI method fails although it does the same thing:

sudo mdutil -E /

Another command will delete the entire index folder. You may have to restart to restart indexing:

sudo mdutil -X /

You can also try restarting the index with:

sudo mdutil -i on /

sudo mdutil -Eai off

sudo mdutil -Eai on

mdutil -as

sudo mdutil -i on /Applications

Check what each mdutil option is supposed to do:

man mdutil

ctrl_alt_defeat wrote:

Could this be a central issue, or is it something like a cache that I need to clear or reset?

The most likely cause is some 3rd party system modification software. Spotlight works by indexing files. 3rd party apps can include their own Spotlight modules for indexing their own document types.

This is all just a guess. Usually, most users reject this explanation.

If you go to System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions > Extensions > Spotlight and disable all 3rd party Spotlight extensions. If that helps, please follow up.