Spotlight search not showing apps after Tahoe update.

If your internal storage is excluded from search, nothing on your internal storage will be found, including applications. So the first step is to stop excluding your internal storage.

Doing that will force the spotlight index to be rebuilt.

Once that’s done (the rebuild will take a few minutes), after entering Spotlight you need to press Command-1 or click the applications button to search for applications. Based on your screenshot, the setting to show those results is already active, which is also required.

After a lot of frustration, I was able to get Tahoe Spotlight to work correctly with some but not all of the "App Background Activity” switches in “Login Items and Extensions”  switched off. One or more of the items that I turned off appeared to be causing the problem, but I have not been able to narrow it down any further. Some other people report in Apple Discussions that the Adobe items cause the issue, which may be true, but there are definitely other culprits since Spotlight still would not work for me after turning off just my Adobe items.

Start by turning these all off and I believe you will see that Spotlight works correctly. Then turn them back on one by one and see what happens. This is very reminiscent of the old System Extension conflicts that existed (and infuriated) in pre-OSX days.

For sure, it seems as though the bug is related to login extensions.

Apologies for the obvious, but please confirm that in System Settings > Spotlight you are set to show Apps in Results from System.

Not that it helps you, but it works correctly for me so it's not a universal issue.

From what I've seen, Spotlight searches are rather buggy so far in Tahoe. I suspect it's because the functionality of Spotlight was significantly expanded with the update. Hopefully macOS 26.1 (which is imminent) will fix some of these issues.

Well a week later it has again stopped working so this fix does not seem to be permanent.