Spotlight not working on a Mac: the checks that actually fix it

Spotlight failing is rarely mysterious. It is almost always one of five things, and four of them you can fix in a couple of minutes. The fifth is not a fault at all, which is why rebuilding the index over and over never helps.

First, work out which failure you have

Open Spotlight and search for a file you are certain exists. Then search for a word you know is inside that file. The two results tell you a lot:

• Neither returns anything. The index for that volume is missing or broken.
• The filename works, the contents do not. The index exists but is partial, which usually means it was interrupted partway through building.
• Everything on the internal disk works, the external does not. This is the common one, and it is a different problem entirely. Skip to the last section.

Check the volume is actually being indexed

Open Terminal and run:

mdutil -s /

You want to see Indexing enabled. If it says indexing is disabled, something turned it off, often an old cleanup app or a setting copied over during a migration. Turn it back on with:

sudo mdutil -i on /

To check an external, use its path under /Volumes, for example mdutil -s /Volumes/Archive.

Check the privacy exclusion list

Go to System Settings, then Siri and Spotlight, and scroll to Search Privacy. Anything listed there is deliberately hidden from Spotlight. Folders end up in this list more often than people expect, usually added years ago and forgotten, or added by an installer.

This list is also the safest way to force a rebuild. Drag the disk or folder in, wait a few seconds, then remove it. Spotlight discards the old index and starts fresh, without touching anything else on the system.

Rebuild the index properly

If the privacy-list trick does not do it, erase the index directly:

sudo mdutil -E /

Then leave the Mac alone. A full reindex of a busy internal drive takes anywhere from twenty minutes to a few hours, and it is slower on a laptop running on battery. Searching during that window gives incomplete results, which is what convinces people the rebuild failed when it is simply still working.

Two things quietly prevent an index from ever finishing. A file named .metadata_never_index at the top level of a volume tells Spotlight to skip that volume entirely, and it is easy to miss because it is invisible in Finder by default. Time Machine backup disks are also excluded by design, and no amount of rebuilding will change that.

The case rebuilding will never fix

Spotlight only searches volumes that are mounted right now. Unplug a drive and every file on it drops out of your search results completely. Not ranked lower, not shown greyed out. Gone, as though the disk never existed.

For a Mac with one internal disk that is invisible. For anyone working off externals, which is most people, since Apple ships small internal drives, it is the single biggest gap in Mac search. You cannot rebuild your way out of it, because there is nothing wrong. Spotlight is behaving exactly as designed.

Some drives will not index well even while connected. exFAT volumes, the format most cross-platform and camera drives use, often index unreliably or not at all, and a read-only or network volume may be skipped outright.

Searching drives that are not connected

GetFerret keeps its own catalog of every drive you have ever plugged in, and that catalog stays searchable after the drive is unmounted and put away. Search for a file and you are told which disk holds it, whether or not that disk is on your desk.

It goes one step further with the drawer finder. Eject a cataloged drive and Ferret asks where you are putting it. Tell it once, top desk drawer, and every future result for a file on that disk says so. That is the part no rebuild can give you, because the answer is not in the index. It is in the drawer.

None of this replaces Spotlight for your internal disk, and it is not meant to. If your internal index is broken, fix it with the steps above. If your problem is that half your files live on shelves, that is a different tool.