How to turn off (or limit) Spotlight on a Mac

Spotlight indexes everything on your Mac so you can search instantly. But it can hog CPU while rebuilding its index, and some users want more privacy or a quieter search bar. Here's how to limit or disable it — from a quick category tweak to a full Terminal shutdown.

Limit which folders Spotlight indexes

This is the least disruptive option. Instead of disabling Spotlight entirely, you tell it to leave certain folders alone.

1. Open System Settings → Siri & Spotlight.
2. Scroll down to Spotlight Privacy and click it.
3. Click + and add any folder or drive you want excluded — a development projects folder, an external drive, a Downloads folder you'd rather not have indexed.

Spotlight removes those locations from its index immediately and won't re-index them. To undo: return to the same pane and click – to remove a location from the exclusion list.

Turn off categories you don't want

By default, Spotlight searches across a wide range of categories: Mail, Contacts, Bookmarks, Fonts, Developer documentation, and more. Most people use a small fraction of those.

Go to System Settings → Siri & Spotlight and uncheck any category you never use. Fewer active categories means faster results and less visual noise when you do search. The change takes effect immediately, and you can re-enable any category by ticking it back on.

Disable Spotlight indexing for a volume via Terminal

If you want to stop Spotlight indexing the entire root volume — which is the most aggressive option — you can do it from Terminal:

# turn off indexing for the root volume
sudo mdutil -i off /

macOS will ask for your password. After this, Spotlight's search bar still opens but returns no file results — it can still show calculator results and unit conversions, but nothing from your local disk.

To re-enable indexing:

# turn indexing back on
sudo mdutil -i on /

After re-enabling, Spotlight will rebuild the index in the background. Expect elevated CPU usage for 10–30 minutes depending on how many files you have.

A note of caution: disabling root-volume indexing breaks Spotlight search completely. It also breaks some third-party app launchers and utilities that depend on the Spotlight index. Most users are better served by excluding specific folders or turning off categories rather than going this route.

Rebuild the Spotlight index (if it's slow or stuck)

Spotlight occasionally gets into a state where it shows stale results, misses recently created files, or sits at 100% CPU for hours. Rebuilding the index fixes this:

# erase and rebuild the Spotlight index
sudo mdutil -E /

This deletes the existing index and starts fresh. Results will be sparse for a few minutes while Spotlight re-indexes. It's safe to run at any time and won't affect your files — only the search index is erased.

Does Spotlight send data to Apple?

Yes — by default, Spotlight queries Apple's servers for web results and Siri suggestions whenever you type in the search bar. If you're on a restricted network, concerned about privacy, or just want faster local-only results, you'll want to turn those off separately.

The setting lives in System Settings → Siri & Spotlight → Search Results — untick Siri Suggestions and Web Searches. There's a full walkthrough in the guide to disabling Spotlight web results.