Search within Mail, Settings, Photos, other apps not working

Has Spotlight finished indexing your storage? Spotlight re-indexes your Mac after a macOS update, and this process can take some time.

More info from Apple: About Spotlight indexing and search results on Apple devices - Apple Support

What you describe is not expected behavior. You should be seeing "Show Related Content" in the upper progress wheel space on your screenshot, and the lower one should have toggles to show results from Apps and System.

Here are the settings you should see in that settings pane: Spotlight settings on Mac - Apple Support

Having said that, I do not see the section for Results from Apps at all, only the Results from System section.

When I look in Activity Monitor, I do see the Spotlight indexing process (mds_stores, mdworker, etc.).

Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

Even though they are not using much at all in the way of resources, that suggests my indexing is not complete. I updated to 27.2 about 10 hours ago, and as stated above it takes some time —even a day or two— to fully reindex internal storage.

I would wait a day to allow the indexing to complete. Else, you can 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. Those two commands essentially nuke all the Spotlight records then force a reindex. You may need to restart or log out/in after running the commands.

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

That certainly suggests something deeper going on. If you have 3rd party ‘protection’ software installed, that may be the problem. That includes:

• Cleaners (software claiming to automatically free up space)
• Optimizers (software claiming to make your Mac run faster)
• Antivirus software
• VPN software (unless provided by a school/employer to enable access to internal resources from a remote location)

Such 3rd party system ‘helpers’, ‘cleaners’ and ‘protectors’ do more harm than good. In fact, such products are completely unnecessary for macOS and the only ‘good’ (if you want to call it that) they do is to put money in the developers’ pockets. Cleaners and protectors cause compatibility issues, often after macOS updates. Commercial VPNs claim to hide your browsing activity from websites, and while that may be true those VPN providers just sell your browsing data to others. For the user, all of these types of software offer only harm…and if that is limited to harm to your bank account, then count yourself lucky. If you have installed such software, follow the developer’s instructions to completely uninstall it (note that some developers fail to provide instructions and their software installs can be pervasive, meaning the only way to truly remove it is to erase your Mac, reinstall macOS then restore your user files from a backup).

It might help to download and run EtreCheck, written by a long-time forum member. The free version is fine. Post the full report using the Additional Text button. No personal information is revealed. 

The suggestion wasn't about EtreCheck's evaluation of your Mac's performance, but rather about identifying system extensions that may be causing the problem you are seeing. Your Mac is not functioning properly, and there must be a reason. Spotlight should be indexing your files, and you should be able to change the results shown in System Settings. That's how it works for me, and pretty much everyone else.

Consider that Apple eliminated Launchpad and replaced it with Apps which is just Spotlight. Spotlight is now integrated with Siri AI. The upshot is that Spotlight is a core functionality of macOS that has become even more central and tightly integrated into macOS. Except that it's broken for you.

See if the problem is present when you boot in safe mode. That process performs some system cleanup and clears caches, and also disables 3rd party extensions that may cause problems.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

If that does not correct the issue, test in a new user account. A newly-created user account will have all settings at default, and if the issue does not occur in that new account then it provides guidance on what may need to be changed to correct the issue.

Add a user or group on Mac - Apple Support

Once the testing is complete, the new account can easily be deleted.

Delete a user or group on Mac – Apple Support

Thanks for your reply. As I said, this has been going on for some time (at least as far back as macOS 26), and I've applied numerous updates, so this is not a case of Spotlight not having enough time to index my machine—unless it needs multiple years. 😊

Activity Monitor does not show any Spotlight-related tasks consuming CPU, but I still have the spinning background task indicator for the missing fields in the Spotlight settings.

I have also used those mdutil commands before, and just ran them again. No much changed, including what Activity Monitor now shows:

[Edited by Moderator]

I've run EtreCheck (I have the Pro version) a number of times, and there's no significant issues reported.