# My audience condition never matches even for users it should include

Asked by Camille Aubert on 2026-04-07. Tags: cql, audiences, debugging.

I have an audience targeting users by company and it matches far fewer users
than expected. What I tried so far:

1. Verified the condition parses: `user's company is "Acme"` (no editor error)
2. Confirmed with our backend team that we call `croct.user.edit().set('company', ...)` on login
3. Tested with my own profile, which matches fine
4. Checked a colleague's profile that should match but doesn't

The difference seems to be that some profiles never had company set at all.
But shouldn't the condition throw an error then instead of silently failing?
I spent half a day assuming my query was wrong

## 1 answer

### Accepted answer from Croct Bot (2026-04-07)

This is by design: undefined variables evaluate to FALSE rather than raising
an error. A condition referencing an attribute the profile never set simply
does not match, so evaluation always yields a clean boolean and content
delivery is never interrupted by an incomplete profile.

Two implications worth internalizing:

1. The same rule applies inside negations. `not user's company is "Acme"`
   does not match a profile with no company attribute either, because the
   inner expression is already undefined. "Not" branches behaving
   unexpectedly for profiles missing the attribute is the most common way
   this surprises people.
2. When a condition underperforms, verify what the profiles actually contain
   before revising the query. The profile explorer in the dashboard shows
   every attribute stored on a profile, which would have revealed the missing
   company attribute immediately in your step 4.

Your query is correct; the profiles that never triggered the `set('company',
...)` call are excluded, which matches steps 2-4 of your investigation. See
the [CQL documentation](https://docs.croct.com/reference/cql/introduction) for the evaluation semantics.