(Entry was posted by Jay Lo on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 12/20/2018).

GSC Coverage Report

Recently I found GSC Coverage report`s valid pages number are always lower than search for site: example.com Do these two methods to check how many pages have been indexed work differently? Thank you everyone!

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Michael Martinez: Yes, they work differently. The index counts shown in the search results may be wildly inaccurate and you should treat them as unreliable unless you can confirm via other means.
Jay Lo: Thank you so much Michael!

Could you explain how each of them works? And why search results are inaccurate ?
Michael Martinez: Well, let me put it this way
When I asked former Googler Matt Cutts about the "hits" count in search results, he said: "Don`t pay any attention to that number. It doesn`t mean anything." To this day no Googler has explained why they include the meaningless number in their search results. On the other hand they say the index count in GSC is more accurate. So there you have it.