New Google Search Generative Experience Drops Result Count

Google’s new Search Generative Experience seems to be missing one thing that SEOs and reporters often look at: the number of results Google returns for that query.

Some use it for a site command to see how many pages Google indexed from a site, which is not a good estimate. Some use it to say how important and competitive a topic is. Some use it to make a good headline about a topic. And some just like to see how many results Google can s how for a specific query.

But in the new Search Generative Experience, Google is not showing the result count as Glenn Gabe noted on Twitter.

Here is a raw site command on the new Search Generative Experience, there is no number of results being shown:

I tried on mobile as well, same deal. But then I thought, why not just ask it like you would in real life, as a long query. So I searched for [how many pages did Google index on www.seroundtable.com] and nope, it initially didn’t generate an answer, so I clicked the generate AI response and it gave me this:

The traditional search experience looks like this, by the way:

31,200 results is what it returned. Again, site commands are not accurate, according to Search Console I have about 130,000 pages indexed. So it is probably a good thing the estimated result count is going away?

Here are Glenn’s tweets:

Also, the percentage in the screenshot is from NewsGuard and not SGE. Just wanted to clarify that.

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 31, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.