Missing the Sharepoint Viewers feature, how do I get that feature?

Question

I noticed the site feature of SharePoint viewers isn't available on any of my site collections. Did it get removed via an update for SharePoint 2019?

Answer 1

Hi @Robert Borgstedte
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A Forum. 
I’ve noticed that the SharePoint Viewers feature in SharePoint 2019 seems to be missing or not working for some users. Although there's no official confirmation that it was removed in a recent update, others have reported experiencing the same issue. 
I've found their solution, I hope this also works for you. 
1.SharePoint Viewers option must be activated (you must be the owner of the site to do this) > Please follow the steps below: 

2.The document must have been viewed by at least one person, if no one has seen it nothing will appear.

If the SharePoint Viewers setting is disabled at the tenant level. This setting controls whether site owners can enable the SharePoint Viewers feature or not. To disable this setting, you may follow: SharePoint admin center > Policies > Sharing > uncheck the checkbox Let site owners choose to display the names of people who viewed files or pages in SharePoint.

If this solution doesn't work for you, you may do the Audit Log to track document views.  Honestly, there are limited resources that I cannot test on SharePoint 2019, I was able to conduct testing on Microsoft Exchange Online as an example. Could you please check whether these features are present in SharePoint 2019? I’m not entirely sure if the version you’re using includes them. If possible, please share screenshots so I can better assist you with further guidance. 
If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask. Have a great day! 

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".   

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.