What causes "no matching organizations were found" in owasp-amass/amass?

Expected for new entities: callers proceed to create the Organization

no matching organizations were found

Error message

no matching organizations were found

What it means

orgsWithSameNames queries the graph for Organizations matching any of the supplied names and returns the resulting entity slice. If the query succeeds but returns zero organizations, it wraps the empty result in this error so callers can distinguish 'no orgs at all with these names' from an actual lookup failure.

Source

Thrown at engine/plugins/support/org/match.go:204

			}
		}
	}

	var orgents []*dbt.Entity
	for _, ident := range idents {
		if edges, err := sess.DB().IncomingEdges(ctx, ident, time.Time{}, "id"); err == nil {
			for _, edge := range edges {
				if a, err := sess.DB().FindEntityById(ctx, edge.FromEntity.ID); err == nil && a != nil {
					if _, ok := a.Asset.(*org.Organization); ok {
						orgents = append(orgents, a)
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}

	if len(orgents) == 0 {
		return nil, errors.New("no matching organizations were found")
	}
	return orgents, nil
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 79299dce87)

Solutions

Expected for new entities: callers proceed to create the Organization
Check that prior ingestions actually created name claims (CreateOrgNameClaim) for the target org
Verify query-time name normalization matches claim-time normalization (genNormName)
Test the same name directly via FindOrgByNameClaim to confirm graph state

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

orgs, err := FindOrgByNameClaim(sess, name, src)
if err != nil {
    // empty result — safe to create a new org
}

Try / catch

if _, err := FindOrgByNameClaim(sess, o.Name, src); err != nil {
    // not found: proceed with creation
}

Prevention

Expect empty results for new entities — branch on the error, don't panic
Verify ingestion created name claims for orgs you expect to find
Use identical normalization at claim time and query time

When it happens

Trigger: Called from existsAndSharesAncestorEntity or existsAndHasAncestorInSession with names (o.Name and o.LegalName) that no stored Organization claims — a successful DB query that simply found nothing.

Common situations: First-time ingestion of a brand-new company; names stored under different casing/punctuation than queried; name claims never created for legacy orgs; typo in Name/LegalName.

Understand the failure class

Background: EmptyResultError / "no results found": when an API or scraper succeeds but returns zero rows — this error's family across 9 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of owasp-amass/amass@79299dce87 (2026-09-06). Data as JSON: /api/errors/b604a57b1e6aaee2. Report an issue: GitHub.