Forum Discussion
Ongoing SharePoint Search Issue Across Multiple Tenants: Missing Managed Metadata Crawled Properties
We've been seeing Microsoft Search issues across multiple tenants where Managed Metadata fields are not appearing as crawled properties, making it impossible to map them to managed properties.
A member of the PnP Modern Search community pointed us to Service Health incident SP1393483 ("Admins may have been unable to see the configuration search schema mappings in SharePoint Online"), which Microsoft reported as resolved at the end of July:
https://admin.cloud.microsoft/?source=applauncher#/servicehealth/history/:/alerts/SP1393483
However, we're still seeing these issues across multiple environments.
Sharing this as a heads up in case you're troubleshooting similar SharePoint Search or metadata mapping challenges. It might not just be your tenant!
1 Reply
Because taxonomy fields are missing across tenants after the earlier incident was resolved, distinguish a continuing service fault from normal schema propagation. Confirm each column is a managed-metadata site column, attached to the affected library or list, and populated on test items. In the tenant search schema, search for the internal property, then compare a clean test library with production. If the property is absent, request a reindex once and allow the next automatic crawl to complete; reindexing requests another crawl, but does not create a schema mapping. When the crawled property appears, map it to an unused managed property with the characteristics you need, such as RefinableString for refiners. Do not change mappings of built-in properties used by Microsoft 365 experiences. If identical populated columns remain absent after the crawl window, open a support case with tenant IDs, site URLs, internal column names, timestamps, and the service-health reference.
