Tired of keyword searches that don’t get you what you need in SharePoint? Content Query is your new best friend. In this episode, I’m joined by Microsoft MVP Drew Madelung to show how you can filter document libraries by specific metadata fields—without building custom search pages or touching the search schema.

You’ll learn:
What Content Query is and how it works
How to filter by custom columns like dates, people, taxonomy, and more
Why this feature is built-in (but still hidden from most users)
Real tips for adoption, performance, and training your users

Whether you’re building content AI pipelines or just trying to improve findability for your team, this episode will help you make search smarter in SharePoint.

Video SummaryContent Query lets you filter by metadata, not just keywords—so you can find exactly what you need using fields like date, owner, or content type, right inside your document library.No need to mess with the search schema anymore—just interact with your columns (sort, group, modify views), and SharePoint will index them automatically for filtering.It’s free once you enable Microsoft 365’s pay-as-you-go setup—no extra cost, no custom web parts, and no workflows required. Just use what’s already built in.Filtering is per library, but super powerful—you can combine multiple filters (like owner + date + content type) to narrow down results fast, even in massive libraries.Train your users! Since this feature lives quietly in the search box, it’s easy to miss. Build awareness and training into your SharePoint adoption strategy to help teams maximize its benefits.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Do you have a ton of content in SharePoint but still struggle to find what matters most? With Content Query, part of the SharePoint Content AI functionality, you can enable easy-to-use filters in your document libraries. In this video, I’m joined by Microsoft MVP Drew Madelung, who will teach us everything we need to know about this functionality.

Drew, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you, Vlad. My name is Drew Madelung, and I’ll be talking today all about the Content Query functionality as part of SharePoint’s Content AI solutions. What we’re going to be going through is: what is Content Query, how does it work, and some tips about working with Content Query for the information that you already have. For those of you who have been following the series, we’re at part 13 of the amazing SharePoint Content AI functionalities. And for those of you that are new to the series, welcome in, and make sure you check out the other videos so you know how to make the most out of SharePoint.

Let’s get started on Content Query. I’m excited. Thank you, Vlad.
Starting, what is Content Query? Content Query, as part of SharePoint Content AI, enables us to do fast, precise searching directly within our document libraries. If you’ve watched previous videos on document processing or autofill to extract metadata, we’re talking about findability and discoverability. I want to pull metadata out, extract that information, and now I want to find that information. Content Query allows me to look for specific metadata column values instead of relying on keyword searches. I can open up a library where I’ve extracted a bunch of metadata—say, invoice information. Instead of just typing “invoice for Vlad” at the top, I can start filtering based on the metadata I’ve extracted or created.

This is part of SharePoint search, so it’s native inside the search box at the top. You don’t have to add anything to your library or a web part—it’s built-in. What you’ll see is a small icon with three bars (not a full ellipsis) at the top of the document library. You won’t see it until you click into “Search this library.” Then, you’ll be able to click that icon, and it will pull up a filter pane for you to work with and filter your information.

This does require Microsoft 365 Pay-As-You-Go services to be set up. We have a video earlier in the series that goes deep into the configuration and setup for Pay-As-You-Go, but this feature relies on that service being available.
It requires Pay-As-You-Go, but it doesn’t cost anything, right?
Correct. Similar to other Content AI functionality, this is not a consumption-based solution. It’s simply available to you once you’ve enabled Pay-As-You-Go, with no cost to you.
Awesome. So that’s even better—it’s free. I love it.

What you need to know as you’re working with this is that the SharePoint columns you work with—those you’ve created in a library—need to be queryable. Not every column fits that type. Not everything will work. Columns need to be queryable. If you’re familiar with SharePoint’s history, these are searchable columns, mapped properties, crawl properties—they exist and will happen for you, but they need to be working in your setup and tenant.

The columns that work for this are your main column types: text, note (multi-line text), date, people, and choice columns. These are the internal names of the column types you’ll be working with. When you add a column, these are the ones you’ll get to work with. A really nice one to have is the managed metadata or taxonomy fields—you can use Content Query for those as well.

When working with Content Query in your libraries, you might not see anything right away. This is all based on search. Let’s say I’ve done some invoice extraction and pulled out five different columns. It will take time for those to appear, and you need to have an action occur in those libraries. You need to interact with those columns—make them queryable—and that happens by working with the columns themselves. You can modify the view, make sure the columns are visible, group them, sort them—do something to ensure the columns have action and work with the files. Then, it could take up to five days for the columns to show in the filter pane.

So, big thing to note: it might take time. You need to work with the content. If you’ve just done a big migration and added a large extraction but never worked with it, you need to go work with that content to make it active.

I just want to double-check something. We come from the old-school SharePoint world, where we spent too much time in the search schema. If I understand correctly, I don’t need to go into the actual search schema.
Exactly. If you’re familiar with the search schema, this is not something where you need to map crawl properties or work with them. They can be list columns or site columns. All that has to happen is that you have to interact with them. You don’t need to map anything. The workflow happens automatically. It will automatically index those columns, and once that happens and the data has been indexed, Content Query will render those columns available to you.

So, new libraries work by default. Existing libraries—first time a user clicks it, they’re not lucky. They won’t be lucky. But by the time you get to their support ticket, it will work.
It’ll definitely take some time when you’re testing this. So, if you’re following this video and checking your own library, click on it, modify the view a little, work with the columns and data, and then come back later—up to five days. I’ve seen it take a couple of hours to a day, depending on the size of your tenant and how much indexing is happening.

Awesome. But I still love that I don’t have to go to the search schema. I don’t want to say it’s my nightmare, but it’s not a fun place in the admin center.
Absolutely not. That one could still use some refreshing these days.

When you use Content Query, regardless of indexing, there are default columns available. That setup will occur primarily for custom fields you’ve added. But document libraries have default columns like file name, modified date, and a big one—content type. If you’ve worked with content types (as you should), you can have multiple content types in a library and filter by them—like invoice or contract—by default, without any configuration changes.

When you add custom columns (site or list columns), you’ll get an “Add more options” section. These custom columns won’t appear in the default filter pane. You’ll need to click “Add more options” to add them to your filter pane.

Let’s see it in action. I’m going into a document library called “Formulation Working Documents.” You’ll see a collection of metadata: document name, status, author, owner, and date. These were extracted through different Content AI solutions across multiple file types—Word, PowerPoint, etc.

Let’s say I want to find content from a specific date. A couple of weeks ago, I created some ingredient files and want to find them. I could search for “report,” and it would do a keyword search. But that’s not what I want. Content Query empowers this functionality. These three lines here are something people should know more about. When you click them, you get a filter pane with keywords, file name, people, modified date, and file type.

You’ll also see a section called “Add more options.” Let’s say I want to find a file with a specific document date—April 11th. I go into “Document Date,” select “Equals,” and pick the date using a date picker. This is a date column. I filter based on custom dates and instantly narrow down my files using that metadata field extracted with Content Query.

As I move through different libraries, you’ll see different information available. All the custom columns I pulled out will be included. Regardless of the site or library, the functionality works across all of them. Depending on the column types, you’ll have different functionality. For example, the “Document Owner” column uses the people picker—not just basic text. I can select “Cable,” click search, and it will find the file. Imagine a library with 100,000 documents—keyword searching is hard. This lets you filter quickly.

You can even add multiple filters. I’ll add “Document Date equals April 11th.” Now I’ve filtered down to a single file. Multiple filtering options together using Content Query help you find specific files—all natively inside your document library. No custom workflows, no search schema management. Just create your columns, work with them, and find information using the search box.

I love it. Even with Copilot improving search, this filtering gives me certainty. I know I’m filtering by the metadata I’ve invested time in. I’ve built custom solutions like this for clients before, so having it built-in is amazing.

Normally, we’d build search experiences on top of this. The limiting factor is that Content Query is per document library. If I have invoices in multiple sites or libraries, the feature only filters within the current library. For cross-library searches, you’ll still use the broader search experience. But metadata is still king. That’s why we’re doing this series—to help more people take advantage of metadata in SharePoint.

In this series, we’ve covered many ways to get metadata—content extraction with models, autofill columns, image tagging, and OCR. Now that you have it, here’s how to make even more use of it. You can make refined decisions based on metadata. It makes your data more powerful.

A huge thing for me is awareness. This feature is native and built-in, but people don’t know the timing—it might take time to appear. So, training and education for this feature are more necessary than for other Content AI functionality. Because it’s part of the search box, users might not know how to use it. It should have a one-pager or training as part of your SharePoint 365 adoption.

When working with content extraction or custom columns, don’t always use text. You can get stuck with “contains” filtering. If you’re working with numerical values or integers, set up number columns, people columns, and taxonomy fields. Don’t default to text—Content Query is more powerful with non-textual values.

Be patient. Columns might not show up right away, but they will eventually. This won’t replace your search web parts—they still play a big role. Content Query lives only in your library. You can select multiple filters—content type, date, owner—and combine them.

As mentioned, this uses Pay-As-You-Go licensing, but there’s no cost after setup.
I love it. Drew, thank you so much for this amazing video. The fact that it’s free and we already have the metadata to make the most of it is just amazing.

For everyone watching, I really hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to check out all the other videos in this SharePoint Content AI deep dive series. You’ll see the playlist appear on your screen right now. And if you want to connect with Drew or check out his other amazing content, make sure to check all the links in the description below.