For searching, you should really be using Contextual Search or AI Search for maximum effectiveness instead of a query. Both of those search tools have ootb topic blocks you can just plug and play. AI Search is the newer one, though you certainly can still use Contextual Search - in fact we use both ourselves: AI Search for the fallback search and Contextual Search for Catalog and/or Knowledge searches just because it's easier and there's ootb search contexts already setup for them.
I'm actually not too knowledgeable about Contextual Search except for grabbing the appropriate sys_id from the Searchers table (cxs_searcher_config) and plugging it into the topic block inputs... but I'm pretty sure that the default catalog searcher does indeed search the Meta field. Technically the catalog search I believe is different than contextual search, but the catalog search is documented here - Configure keyword search for catalog items (servicenow.com) - and explains how it searches the Name > Meta > Short Description > Description fields in that order of precedence and I do assume catalog contextual search is setup fairly similarly.
Have you tried using the Contextual Search topic block yet?
I'm more familiar with AI Search and I can say that for some reason, ootb the Meta field on the Catalog Item table is not searchable, but that can be easily configured/reversed by removing that Field Setting entry on the Indexed Source record.
tl;dr try the Contextual Search topic block with the "Catalog only" context instead of doing a query.
