Spotlight not finding documents on Mac despite indexing

Tahoe not finding documents. Indexing did not work




[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Spotlight

Posted on Sep 19, 2025 9:09 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 9, 2025 10:49 AM

Courtesy of Barney-15E:


Copy/Paste this into Terminal. sudo will ask for your password. Just type the password and hit return. It won't show anything on screen.

sudo mdutil -X /; sudo mdutil -i on /; sudo mdutil -E /

Then, restart or log out and log back into your account.

34 replies

Oct 14, 2025 7:22 PM in response to neuroanatomist

Force-quitting Spotlight and spotlightknowledged processes did not work for me, nor did rebuilding the index. All switches are where they were under OS Sequoia. External drive (also re-indexed) is also invisible to Spotlight.


Relatively few people are encountering this problem, which suggests that there's a conflict with some other application or a particular System configuration.

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Spotlight not finding documents on Mac despite indexing

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