Indexed Page Search Count Not Matching Console

[Boxing_Fan]

This started happening a few days ago and I'm not sure if this is normal or not.

When I do a "site:mywebsite.com" check on Google.com, I get around 202,000 pages. (it used to be in the millions).

But when I check on Webmaster Console, it shows at least 2 million pages indexed.

Any reason why this happened all of a sudden?

[Writerly]

Don't worry, Google Webmaster Console is updated in intervals, not in real time. It just takes time to see the different metrics correctly.

[NickMNS]

The "site:" operator in Google is not a reliable means of measuring the number of indexed pages. The other day I did site: search for a domain it gave some number. I repeated the search with an additional qualifier eg: site:example.com and site:example.com + "blue widget" and the search with "blue widget" returned more pages than without.

The site: operator is good for checking if a specific page is in the index. If it appear in the search then you are sure that it is in the index, but if it is not, then you are not sure, it could still be in the index or not.

As for GSC, again I don't trust it. Over the past few month I have seen a steady decline in indexed pages and at the same time a steady increase in traffic.