How do I make a saved search public, and what is the difference between Public and the audience settings?

There is a single checkbox on the saved search form labelled exactly "Public". Tick it and save. Everything else that reads like sharing on that form is a different control doing a different job, and picking the wrong one is most of the confusion.

The controls, as the form actually labels them

Read out of the saved search form itself, these are the publishing and audience controls, verbatim:

Public
Available for Publishing on Website
Available as List View
Available as Dashboard View
Available as Sublist View
Available for Reminders
Show In Menu
Allow Audience to Edit
Internal roles
External roles
Run Unrestricted
Owner

Four of those read like "share this search" to somebody scanning the form, and they are not interchangeable.

"Public" is the one that makes the search public.

"Internal roles" and "External roles" are the audience: who can see it. They are a list of roles, not a switch.

"Allow Audience to Edit" is not about visibility at all. It decides whether the audience can change the search rather than only run it. Ticking it because it appears next to the audience list is how a shared search ends up being edited by whoever opened it last.

"Available for Publishing on Website" is a different feature entirely. It concerns publication to a website, not internal sharing, and it is the one most likely to be ticked by mistake because the word "publishing" is what people are looking for.

The remaining view options, "Available as List View", "Available as Dashboard View", "Available as Sublist View", "Available for Reminders" and "Show In Menu", control where the search can be surfaced. This probe read them off the form and did not exercise them, so this page does not describe what each one does beyond its label.

Run Unrestricted is the consequential one

"Run Unrestricted" sits in the same part of the form and governs whether the search runs with the owner's permissions rather than the viewer's.

That makes it the setting to think hardest about when you make a search public. If it is the owner's access that determines what comes back, a public search that runs unrestricted returns its audience rows their own roles would not let them retrieve. That follows from what the setting governs rather than from a test: this probe read the form and did not run a search under a second role. Sharing a search and widening data access are two decisions, and this checkbox is where they get made at the same time by accident.

What was not established

The exact error a user sees when their role lacks the permission to save or share a search. This run executed as Administrator, which holds every permission, so the denial path is simply unreachable: reproducing it would take a restricted role and a test user, and neither was created.

The governing permission is also not named here. The attempt to read the account's role permission catalog hit a URL that does not exist in that account and returned HTTP 500 with a page body reading "Page not found", which is a wrong guess at a URL rather than a NetSuite finding. Naming the permission from memory instead would be the kind of plausible detail that this catalog exists to avoid, so it stays unnamed until a run with a non-administrator role can read it out of the system.

If you are troubleshooting a role that cannot make searches public, that is the gap: this page can tell you which checkbox does it and cannot tell you what the refusal looks like.

How to check what a search is currently sharing

Open the search in edit mode and read those controls together rather than one at a time. "Public" ticked with an empty audience, "Public" ticked alongside "Run Unrestricted", and an audience listed with "Allow Audience to Edit" ticked are three different postures, and the form does not summarise which one you have chosen.

Scope: one sandbox account on NetSuite 2026.1, Administrator role. This was a UI probe: the labels above were read directly from the saved search form, so the wording matches what a user sees on the screen in that version. What each checkbox does beyond the meanings stated above was not exercised, and no permission behaviour was tested.