How to Flag Items to be Crawled in Office 365

Whenever you do changes to the search schema, re-crawl of the content is required to fill in the search index with the proper values by the new schema.

In SharePoint on-prem, the classic recommendation is to do a full crawl.

But what to do in Office 365 where we cannot initiate full crawl?

Well, there are two three things to do:

1. You can re-crawl a list or document library.
2. You can re-crawl a site.
3. You can ask support to do a full crawl on your tenancy.

Re-crawl a list or document library

If you want to re-crawl a list or document library, follow these steps:

1. Go to the List / Library Settings.
2. Open Advanced Settings.
3. Scroll down to Reindex Document Library and click on the button.
4. Confirm that you really want to re-crawl:

Recrawl a site

If you want to re-crawl a whole site and it’s all content, there is a similar option on site-level, too:

1. Go to Site Settings.
2. Scroll down to “Search”.
3. Click on “Search and offline availability”
4. Click on “Reindex site”.
5. Confirm again.

Remember: these options do not change the crawl schedule (when the next continuous crawl runs). Instead, they make sure your content will be re-crawled again.

Submit a support ticket to re-crawl your tenancy

If your changes are rather global for your whole tenancy, it might be easier to re-crawl everything. If this is the case, please contact Office 365 support team.

[learn_more caption=”Update: SPO-Trigger-Reindex” state=”open”]Mikael Svenson’s scripts to trigger re-indexing of user profiles and content in SharePoint Online on GitHub:
https://github.com/wobba/SPO-Trigger-Reindex

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