My Lookout proposed nothing

A Lookout that finds nothing is usually working. Rows drop out at four distinct stages, and knowing which one tells you whether to change the rule or leave it alone.

1. Nothing was selected

The grain and scope found no rows at all.

The common causes: a scope pinned to one marketplace, a grain that does not hold what you think (target is keywords and product targets, not campaigns), or a period with no data — remember that advertising history starts roughly 90 days before each account was connected, per marketplace.

2. The condition matched nothing

Rows were selected; none satisfied the when.

This is the healthy case, and often the true one. "No target has spent $10 without an order this month" is a good answer to the question, not a failure to answer it.

Two traps worth knowing:

• Zero is not missing. A target with no orders recorded and a target that had no data fetched are different things, and comparing against zero will treat them the same way.
• every() refuses an empty set. A condition asking that all of something be true is false when there is nothing to check. none() and at_most() behave the other way.

3. The row was held back

The condition matched and a guard stopped it anyway. This is the stage worth reading, because the extension names each one:

Its price moved inside the period this rule judges. The ACoS the rule would act on is measuring two different prices. The window comes from your own rule, not from a fixed quiet period — so a rule judging 7 days is held by a price change in those 7 days, and a rule judging 90 is not.

Ads are still feeding it. Advertising is feeding the product — thin organic sales are not the whole story enough to act on.

Out of season. A seasonal product judged outside its season.

None of these applies to a report-only Lookout. If you want to see what a rule would say without any guard interfering, set the action to report only.

4. It could be proposed but not queued

Three actions compile, run, and preview correctly, and then decline to enter the queue: setting a price, editing attributes, and adding a product. This is deliberate rather than broken. The restriction is on the rule, not on the change: a price you stage by hand from the Catalog queues and applies normally. An advertising proposal can be walked back and a catalogue one often cannot, so a rule is not yet allowed to make them for you. The Lookout tells you it found something and tells you it cannot act on it, which is more useful than pretending neither happened.

Reading the funnel

Preview shows the counts at each stage. Start at the top:

• Nothing selected → the grain, the scope, or the period.
• Nothing matched → the condition, or genuinely nothing to do.
• Everything held → a guard, and the guard is usually right.
• Nothing queued → a blocked action.

A rule that selects thousands and matches none is a rule looking in the right place with the wrong question. A rule that selects nothing is looking in the wrong place.