---
title: "Document searchability explained"
canonical_url: "https://www.nutrient.io/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/searchability-status/"
md_url: "https://www.nutrient.io/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/searchability-status.md"
last_updated: "2026-05-15T09:08:03.584Z"
description: "Learn about document searchability, including fully searchable, partially searchable, and image-only categories for better indexing and retrieval."
---

# Understanding document searchability levels

The searchability status of a document describes how indexable the document is. It is classified in the following 3 categories:

1. Fully Searchable

   > A PDF document is fully searchable if all its pages have text that can indexed and searched.

2. Partially Searchable

   > A partially searchable document contains some pages with text, others with only images or no images and no text (blank)

3. Image-only

   > This is a PDF that has been created from one or more images – most commonly because of scanning a document either directly to PDF or by converting a scanned TIFF image to PDF.  These files do not contain any searchable text and most often comprise a set of Group4 or JBIG2 images in a PDF “wrapper”.
   >
   > Image documents (TIFF, BMP, JPG and PNG) are always identified as image-only.

---

## Related pages

- [Enable document archiving for safe backups](/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/archiving.md)
- [Document Searchability service overview](/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/aquaforest-searchlight-service.md)
- [Optimize document processing with searchability](/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/searchlight-libraries.md)
- [Enhancing document searchability through audits](/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/audit-and-candidate-identification.md)
- [Supported document formats for searchability](/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/supported-formats.md)
- [Optimizing document searchability in SharePoint](/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts/document-stores-concepts.md)
- [Optimize document searchability with auditing and OCR](/guides/document-searchability/audit-and-ocr/architecture-and-concepts.md)