TL;DR: If Spotlight can’t find your apps, rebuild the Launch Services database with lsregister. It takes a few seconds and doesn’t require a reindex of your entire drive.

The problem Link to heading

Spotlight stopped finding some of my applications. Searching for apps I knew were installed returned nothing, or surfaced web results instead. Finder search was equally useless.

What didn’t work Link to heading

My first instinct was to reindex Spotlight for /Applications:

sudo mdutil -E /Applications

But that just gives you:

Error: unknown indexing state.

That’s because /Applications isn’t a separate volume — it’s part of the root filesystem, so mdutil doesn’t know what to do with it.

You can reindex the entire drive with sudo mdutil -E /, but that’s slow and turned out to be the wrong fix anyway — Spotlight’s content index was fine, it just couldn’t see my apps.

What actually worked Link to heading

The issue was the Launch Services database, which is the registry macOS uses to track which apps are installed and what file types they handle. Spotlight relies on this to surface applications in search results.

Rebuild it with:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

That’s it. Takes a few seconds, no sudo required, and Spotlight should find your apps again immediately.

Note: older guides suggest adding the -kill flag. Apple removed it in recent macOS versions — you’ll get a warning if you try. Just drop it.

Further reading Link to heading