---
summary: Pages not appearing in search, or stale snippets.
title: Search index issues
path: troubleshooting/search-index-issues
status: published
---

# Search index issues

## "I wrote a page and search doesn't find it"

Index writes are async. Expect 1–3 seconds of lag, longer if the worker is
backed up.

1. **Worker running?** `ps aux | grep scaicms-worker`.
2. **Queue size**: in the admin UI go to **Queue Monitor**.
3. **Force a reindex** of the namespace:
   ```bash
   python -m scaicms.cli docs-index reindex --namespace <slug>
   ```

## "Search returns old text"

The chunker re-chunks on every page write — old chunks are deleted before
new ones are inserted. If you see old text, you're probably hitting a cache.
Try `?_nocache=1` on the search URL to bypass.

## "I think the index drifted"

```bash
python -m scaicms.cli.index_management check       # content
python -m scaicms.cli docs-index status            # docs
```

If counts disagree with the DB, run a full reindex. As a last resort:

```bash
python -m scaicms.cli docs-index reset             # destructive!
python -m scaicms.cli docs-index reindex
```