The following tutorial gives a step-by-step guide to set up a crawl account for Aspire. These steps have to be followed on each site that needs to be crawled.

Option 1. Site Collection Administrator

The first option is to add the crawl account as Site Administrator, which will grant sufficient permissions to access all items on the site.

To set the rights for your account at the Web Application level, do the following:

1. Open the Microsoft 365 administration site (https://admin.microsoft.com).
2. Go to Admin Centers → SharePoint.
3. Go to Sites → Active Sites
4. Select the site collection that you want to crawl.
5. Click on Permissions ⇾ Manage additional admins.
6. Add the Aspire crawl account to the "Site Admins" list.
7. Click on "Save".

Option 2. Custom Site Permission Level

If setting up the crawl account as Site Admin is not possible, follow these steps to set a custom Site Permission Level for the account in each Site Collection.  

You will need to have an account created in Azure AD available to use this method.

Step 1. New Permission Page

On the Site to crawl, go to the Site Settings / Site Permission / Advanced permissions settings / Permission Levels page and click on Add a Permission Level

Step 2. Name and Description

On the "Add a Permission Level" page, set a name and description for the new permission. 

Step 3. List Permissions

Set the following List of Permissions:

• View Items
• Open Items
• View Versions
• View Application Pages

Step 4. Site Permissions

Set the following Site Permissions:

• View Web Analytics Data
• Browse Directories
• View Pages
• Enumerate Permissions
• Browse User Information
• Use Remote Interfaces
• Open

Step 5. Create the Permission

Leave the Personal Permissions unchecked and click Create.

Step 6. Assign the Permission

Assign the new permission to the crawl account. For this, go to Site Settings / Site Permission / Advanced permissions settings / Grant Permissions

On the Invite people section, select the crawl account to assign the permissions to, and on Show Options select the Permission Level you created previously.