Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The site:domain.com search seems to show less pages than it used to (Google and Bing).

It doesn't relate to a specific site but all sites. For example, I will get "page 1 of about 3,000 results" but by the time I've paged through the results it will end and change to "page 24 of 201 results". In that example If I look in GSC it shows 1,932 indexed.

Should I now accept the "pages" listed in site: is an unreliable metric?

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your input.

The reason for doing it is part of an SEO site review process to examine pages indexed in Google compared to a site crawl in a tool like screaming frog and the indexed pages defined in GSC.

In terms of the "page 24 of 201 results" example, I mean that when you first use the site:domain.com Google will give you an estimated number of results, e.g. 3000 but actually as you click through the pages you find that the number of results is reduced - sometimes significantly.