How to know if it's safe to remove a managed property?

Question

Is there a way to determine if a managed property can safely be removed from Search in the SPO Admin Center?

For example, I have "UnitOWSTEXT". It has no crawled property mapped to it. Is this the only criteria I have to check for to make sure it's not used in any other way in the tenant?

And by the way, can you even remove a managed property in SPO? I read somewhere that in SP Server you would have to create a new search service application for that.

Thanks for you reply.

Answer 1

There is no OOB method to check if it’s safe to remove a managed property. In actually, if we delete a managed property:

1. Users can't search on the property.

2. A query rule that uses the property no longer works.

3. A custom web part that uses the property no longer works.

You can check the points above to estimate if the managed property will impact the relevant function.

However, as Bunzab said, there are some automatic created managed property in the search schema, I suggest you not removing them.

To reduce the performance impact of managed property, you can deselect the Searchable, Queryable, Retrievable checkboxes.

Besides, we can delete a managed property from tenant and site collection level in SharePoint Online.

More information refer to the article: Manage the search schema in SharePoint Online