I look after a big photo library with smart search, and I recently wasted real time trusting the wrong signal. The background job that builds the search index showed zero completed items, so I reported the index as empty and not working. It was working. The counter had reset; the embeddings were all still there. What actually settled it was a known-item test: search for something I knew existed in the library, in quantity, and look at whether those items ranked at the top of the results. They did — overwhelmingly. Index fine, counter meaningless. The general rule I've kept: a progress counter tells you what a process last reported, not what state the system is in. If you want to know whether an index, a cache, or a sync actually works, query it for something whose answer you already know, and judge it on what comes back.