SharePoint search crawl not working [Fixed]: Incremental and Full crawl is not running automatically in SharePoint 2016

SharePoint search crawl not working – sometimes, we might notice in the SharePoint on-premise server that the incremental and full crawl is not running automatically suddenly, even though the crawler was configured and scheduled. All of a sudden it stopped running automatically, however, it was running as per the schedule earlier. Now, if we try to run the incremental or full crawl manually it works.

In this article, we will learn what is the root cause of not running the incremental or full crawler automatically.

The root cause of not running the incremental or full crawler automatically – SharePoint search crawl not working

Here I am keeping my analysis short, the “Indexing Schedule Manager on <server name>” the out-of-the-box timer job has stopped running suddenly which is responsible for the incremental or full crawl job. If we look at the job running history from the job monitoring navigation of the central administration site (Monitoring -> Check Job Status-> Find the Indexing Schedule Manager on <server name>, we could see that the last run time of this job will be past date and time – after that, it never triggered.

Now if we go to the Monitoring -> Review Job Definition from the central administration site, we will not be seeing this Indexing Schedule Manager on <server name> timer job in the list associated with any of the servers.

Fix or Solution: SharePoint search crawl not working

In order to fix the incremental or full crawler automatic running issue, follow the below steps:

Restart the timer service from the service.msc in all servers connected to the farm.

If the above solution does not fix the issue, restart the application server, or finally, if the above two solutions do not work, then we need to re-provision the search service application. For this refer to our other article on how to re-provision the SharePoint 2016 search service application – Re-Provisioning SharePoint Search Service Application using PowerShell

Summary: SharePoint search crawl not working

Thus, in this article, we have learned about what is the root cause of not running the SharePoint 2016 incremental and full crawler scheduler job automatically and how to fix it.

See Also: SharePoint search crawl not working

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SP Doctor

I am your SharePoint and Power Platform doctor and guide. Sharing knowledge with my fellow colleagues, friends, and the tech community makes me utmost happy in my job.

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