Search

Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux), or select the search field at the top of the app, and start typing. Search looks through everything you can open, wherever it lives, and shows results as you type.

• Your own pages, documents and files, private ones included.
• Your workspaces: everything each workspace lets you open, by its rules. See Privacy and Members and roles.
• What's shared with you by email, and the sub-pages below a shared page.
• Folders and workspaces you're a member of.
• Guides pages of the Guides you have a role on.
• Your Trash. Matches show at the bottom, marked In Trash, with a Restore button. You see the same items as on the Trash page.

Search never shows anything you can't open. Every result is checked against your access when you search, so a removed share or a document made private drops out at once. Other people's public links aren't searched: search is for your own things.

• Typos and half-remembered names. onbording plyabook finds Onboarding Playbook.
• Partial words. Results update as you type, so onboa already finds it.
• Any word order. playbook onboarding works too.
• Inside the text. Search reads headings and the first 20,000 characters of a page's text. In files, it reads the text of HTML pages, PDFs and text files (the first 50,000 characters, read in the background shortly after upload). Other files match by name.
• Section links. When the words match a heading, the result opens at that section.
• Where you are first. The workspace you're in ranks a little higher. Recent changes and your own items do too.

Password-protected and end-to-end encrypted documents match by title only. Their text is never searched and never shown in a snippet. An encrypted document's title is encrypted too, so it matches by its link.

The chips under the search field narrow results to Pages, Documents, Files, Folders or Guides. Inside a workspace, a chip limits the search to that workspace.

See all results opens the search page, with filters for the kind, the workspace, the owner and when it was last updated, and Load more for long lists. In My files, type in the search field and press Enter to search everywhere.

Type a question, like how do we onboard contractors?, or select Ask AI ✦. Search also asks on its own when what you type reads like a question or a description.

1. AI turns your question into search terms.
2. Search finds up to 40 items you can open that match them.
3. AI reads their titles and short excerpts, picks the relevant ones and writes a short answer. Each claim cites its source as a number you can select.

The answer streams in above the results, with its sources listed under it. AI can be wrong, so check the sources.

AI search needs an account and counts towards your AI limits. When a limit is reached, search still works and the card says when AI will be back.

The hosted MCP server's search tool uses the same search, and ask_documents asks a question the same way Ask AI does. See MCP tools.

markdrop search in the CLI uses the same search, with --kind and --workspace filters and the matching text for each result.

With an API token, GET /api/v1/search?q=… returns the same results as JSON: each one's kind, title, workspace and folder, a snippet with the matched words marked, and web_url, a full link to open it. scope=workspace:<id>, kind, owner=me and updated=week|month narrow it, and next_cursor pages through the rest. See Search everything in the API reference.