One interesting question was why the Google search results of a site:query don’t match what Search Console shows for the same website. John responded that there are slightly different optimizations for site:query.
When site:query is used in Google search to determine the number of indexed URLs, Google just wants to return a number as quickly as possible and this can be a very rough approximation. If you need an exact number of URLs that are indexed, he clarified that you should use Search Console to get this information. GSC is where Google provides the numbers as directly and clearly as possible. These can fluctuate, but overall the number shown in Search Console for the indexing report is the number of URLs you have indexed for a website — and is likely to be more accurate than the site:query results shown in the SERPs.
The site:query result is only a rough approximation of pages indexed
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