A detailed study of tunneling spectroscopy concerning semiconductors with a low surface state density is presented. For this purpose,I–Vcurves under dark conditions and under illumination were measured on the (0001) van der Waals surface of ap-typeWS2single crystal, which is known to be free of intrinsic surface states. The measurements are interpreted by an analytical one-dimensional metal-insulator-semiconductor model, which shows that the presence of the finite tunneling current has to be considered in the calculation of the tip-induced bandbending. Rectification of the darkI–Vcurves is explained by the absence of an inversion layer at the semiconductor surface. In contrast, theI–Vcurves measured for different light intensities and tip-sample separations indicate the existence of an optically induced inversion layer. Since no surface recombination needs to be considered to model these spectra, we conclude that bulk recombination, diffusion and direct tunneling of photogenerated minority charge carriers are the dominant processes for semiconductors with a low density of surface states. In contrast to the standard interpretation of tunneling spectroscopy, which can be applied to semiconductors with a high surface state density, our results clearly show that in this case the normalized differential conductivity(dI/dU)/(I/U)cannot be used to determine the energetic distribution of the local surface state density.