Spotlight stopped working after I upgraded to macOS 15 Sequoia. I noticed the error when I can no longer find installed apps with just a few keystrokes; I know spotlight is not just an app launcher, but I use it regularly to launch apps directly.
I found many links online, but none of them can fix my problem. Ended up having to try all the relevant options in the manual page and fixed it. I had a rather large 40TB external disk with many files, took a while to delete and rebuild the index.
I had to fix it by removing Spotlight index directories, I did it to all the key ones indexed by the system and all my mounted volumes.
sudo mdutil -X /
sudo mdutil -X /System/Volumes/Data
sudo mdutil -X /System/Volumes/Preboot
sudo mdutil -X /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/
sudo mdutil -X /Volumes/<To each of the mounted volumes you have>
If the above didn’t solve it for you, the fuller solution involves turning off System Integrity Protection (SIP) with csrutil, stopping mds daemon, deleting indexes, enable spotlight, etc:
csrutil disable
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo mdutil -Ea
sudo mdutil -X /
sudo mdutil -X /System/Volumes/Data
sudo mdutil -X /System/Volumes/Preboot
sudo mdutil -X /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/
sudo mdutil -X /Volumes/<Each mounted volume>
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -i on /System/Volumes/Data
sudo mdutil -i on /System/Volumes/Preboot
csrutil enable
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