The search index management commands throw the following exception when used outside of atlas:

 
Command failed with error 115 (CommandNotSupported): 'Search index commands are only supported with Atlas.' on server localhost:27017. The full response is {"ok": 0.0, "errmsg": "Search index commands are only supported with Atlas."
 
The $listSearchIndexes aggregation stage should also throw a similar exception, noting that $listSearchIndexes is only supported with Atlas.