【Objective】Continuous cropping obstacles (CCOs) represent a critical constraint on the sustainable development of the strawberry industry, with core mechanisms involving soil phenolic acid accumulation, microbial community imbalance, and functional degradation. Although existing studies have demonstrated close correlations between phenolic acid autotoxic substances and microbial community changes, the dynamic evolution patterns and causal relationships of phenolic acid-microbiome interactions at the field scale remain unclear. Thus, this study aims to reveal the dynamic changes of phenolic acids, enzyme activity responses, and microbial community structure evolution in strawberry soil under long-term continuous cropping conditions. Also, the results will clarify the driving mechanisms of phenolic acid-microbiome interactions in CCO formation, and provide theoretical basis for developing precise regulation strategies. 【Methods】Greenhouse strawberry continuous cropping soils (0, 2, 5, 15, and 18 years) were selected as research objects to measure soil physicochemical properties, enzyme activities (urease, catalase, acid phosphatase, and sucrase), and phenolic acid contents (p-hydroxybenzoic acid, ferulic acid, and p-coumaric acid). Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing technology was employed to analyze bacterial and fungal community structures, and redundancy analysis (RDA) was innovatively combined with structural equation modeling to construct causal networks of phenolic acid-microbiome-soil function interactions. 【Results】The results revealed that long-term continuous cropping resulted in significant soil acidification (pH decreased from 7.35 to 6.2), with continuous accumulation of phenolic acids reaching 247.3 mg·kg-1 at 18 years. Soil enzyme activities exhibited “increase-then-decrease” nonlinear dynamics, peaking at 5 years of continuous cropping (urease activity reached 1,527 U·(g h)-1), followed by a significant decline at 15 and 18 years. In addition, microbial community analysis revealed that continuous cropping led to a 23.6% reduction in bacterial Shannon diversity, a 43.3% decrease in the bacteria/fungi ratio, and an increase in the relative abundance of pathogenic fungi (e.g., Fusarium). Redundancy analysis first confirmed that p-coumaric acid (p-CA) was the dominant factor explaining bacterial community variation (18.9%), while ferulic acid (FA) was the key factor explaining fungal community variation (21.2%). Structural equation modeling further revealed that phenolic acids affected microbial communities through dual pathways of direct inhibition (path coefficient = -0.85) and indirect regulation (via soil acidification), with phenolic acids serving as the direct dominant factor inhibiting bacterial communities, while fungal community structure was primarily directly regulated by soil acidification. 【Conclusion】This study elucidated the formation mechanism of CCOs through the “phenolic acid accumulation-soil acidification-microbial imbalance” cascade, revealing the specific effects of phenolic acid as key factors at the field scale. These findings provide a theoretical foundation for developing green prevention and control strategies for CCOs based on microbiome regulation, offering technical support for the sustainable development of the strawberry industry.