Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?

[Ty1986]

Hi mozzers,

When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages.

Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

On the one hand, site: number of results is not the exact nor the current amount of URLs that Google has indexed. It's only just a way of seeing how much results there are. Google said that it's optimized for speed, that why it's an estimated number.
You should trust whats reported in Search Console.

On the other, it's possible that Google has checked an URL and considered as valid on one time and not index it, because of canonicals, similar content or any other reason. If you find some URL not indexed, yet reported as indexed in the coverage report, try checking it through the Inspect URL tool, then asking for the TEST LIVE URL option. There you may find some answers.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston