Count Items In Autofilter

I have a two massive spread sheets in which I am comparing items from one with the other and changing in one if the other doesn't match the first. I already have reduced the processing time from 6 hours to about 2 minutes by rewriting the macro to use autofilter to make the changes. The problem I have now is that I need to keep some metrics on the changes i.e. when I apply an autofilter, I need to be able to assign a variable to the number of items actually shown after autofiltering so I can add it to a variable that is keeping track of total number of changes. I know that outside of VBA, in regular excel use, the status bar displays # of total# found during autofilter, so is there a way to tap into the program and pull that number during execution of a macro?