diff --git a/container-search/src/main/java/com/yahoo/search/searchers/RelatedDocumentsByNearestNeighborSearcher.java b/container-search/src/main/java/com/yahoo/search/searchers/RelatedDocumentsByNearestNeighborSearcher.java
index 37932cd281f7..2dd9e8c38872 100644
--- a/container-search/src/main/java/com/yahoo/search/searchers/RelatedDocumentsByNearestNeighborSearcher.java
+++ b/container-search/src/main/java/com/yahoo/search/searchers/RelatedDocumentsByNearestNeighborSearcher.java
@@ -98,6 +98,9 @@ private Tensor fetchEmbedding(String sourceId, String idField, String embeddingF
         fetchQuery.getRanking().setProfile("unranked");
 
         Result result = execution.search(fetchQuery);
+        if (result.hits().getError() != null) {
+            return null;
+        }
         execution.fill(result, summary);
 
         if (result.hits().size() < 1) {