# How pages are found

Every count you see and every page the run touches comes from a Confluence search. The assistant runs one search per app to produce the counts, then the same search again to drive the run.

That has three consequences worth knowing: the counts are pages rather than macros, the scope is exactly what your filter says, and a rejected filter looks identical to a clean site.

---

## What the search returns

| **Unit**        | Pages, not macros. One page with forty diagrams counts once.                  |
| --------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Filtered**    | Your search filter is applied to every count and to the run itself.           |
| **Order**       | Ascending page id, which broadly means oldest content first.                  |
| **Space scope** | The whole site, or one space if you opened the assistant from space settings. |

---

## Wider than it needs to be, on purpose

The search is deliberately broader than the conversion. It errs towards reading a page that turns out to need nothing, rather than missing one that did. That is why the "pages checked" number dwarfs "pages changed", and why a large Unsupported count is usually normal rather than alarming.

---

## Pages that drop out

A small line under the progress bar reads "N pages skipped, no space metadata returned by search". These are pages the search returned that could not be resolved to a space. They are dropped entirely and never appear in the log at all, so they cannot be reviewed or re-run individually.

⚠️

**A rejected filter is not an empty site.** If Confluence rejects your search clause, every count falls back to zero and a message says so. Zero everywhere almost always means the filter, not the estate.

---

## A few things that catch people out

* There is no page picker. A specific list of pages can only be reached through a search filter that happens to select them.
* On a very large site it is not established whether Confluence itself caps the reachable result set. Verify a big run's page count against your own expectations.
* Pages you cannot read are not returned at all, so they never appear as failures. Pages you can read but not edit do appear, and fail on permission.

---

## Related

[Narrowing what gets migratedWriting the filter.](https://help.gocapable.com/migration/narrowing-what-gets-migrated.html)

[The migration lifecycleWhere search sits in the run.](https://help.gocapable.com/migration/the-migration-lifecycle.html)

[TroubleshootingWhen pages are missing from the log.](https://help.gocapable.com/migration/troubleshooting.html)

---

_Everything starts with the search._