diff --git a/specs/010-search-page-answers/tasks.md b/specs/010-search-page-answers/tasks.md
index 28d2e5c..933c0dc 100644
--- a/specs/010-search-page-answers/tasks.md
+++ b/specs/010-search-page-answers/tasks.md
@@ -62,6 +62,7 @@ state.
 - [ ] T020c Establish whether a search-page question needs all four preprocessing calls. The sequential half of this is answered and done (T019a): they run in two rounds and cost 2.6s at the median, not the ~16s recorded here, which never reproduced
 - [ ] T021 Land spec 009 collection routing and re-measure. **Still open — I marked this done on 2026-09-18 and was wrong.** What landed is *source* routing (`resolve_active_sources` picks reactome / userguide / live). Collection routing is selecting among the five collections *within* the reactome bundle, and it is not implemented: `QueryIntent` has no `collections` field, `resolve_collections` does not exist, and `retrieve_documents` still loops over every collection
 - [ ] T022 Re-assess FR-005 against the result and say plainly whether 2s/10s is reachable
+- [ ] T023 Propagate a real failure signal out of the live path, so `answer_sweep`'s retry keys on the tool exception rather than on the model's prose. Today `answer_from_live_services` catches the exception, logs it and hands the model `"This lookup failed: {exc}"`, which the model paraphrases -- so nothing distinguishes "upstream broke" from "there is genuinely nothing" by the time the sweep sees it. The prose marker that conflated them is removed; what remains is one literal this repo emits itself, which is a narrower guess, not a signal
 
 ## Phase 6: Handover
 
diff --git a/src/evaluation/answer_sweep.py b/src/evaluation/answer_sweep.py
index 7bff412..ba640b1 100644
--- a/src/evaluation/answer_sweep.py
+++ b/src/evaluation/answer_sweep.py
@@ -236,10 +236,31 @@ def _contains(haystack: str, needle: str) -> bool:
 # broken". Seen in the wild: reactome.org served a Cloudflare challenge to a
 # burst of requests and the answer degraded to "I could not find out ... due to
 # a service error" -- which is the error handling working, not a regression.
+#
+# "could not find out" used to be here and was removed 2026-09-19. It is the
+# phrasing `src/reactome_mcp/answer.py` *instructs* the model to use for a
+# legitimate empty result -- "If the tools do not answer the question, say
+# plainly what you could not find out". So it matched a correct negative answer
+# as readily as an outage, and it resolved that ambiguity in the direction that
+# hides regressions: a real failure was retried and could pass on the second
+# attempt, quietly forgiving the thing the gate exists to catch.
+#
+# The two left were put to the same test, 2026-09-19, rather than assumed safe
+# because they read less like instructions. Neither appears in any prompt, tool
+# description or example in this repository. "could not complete that lookup"
+# is a literal emitted only by `answer_from_live_services`; "service error" has
+# no source here at all, and can only arise from the model paraphrasing the
+# `"This lookup failed: {exc}"` it is handed when a tool actually raised. So
+# both derive from real failure paths rather than from intended output.
+#
+# That is evidence, not proof: the MCP tool descriptions come from the remote
+# server and are not checked here. The real one
+# would be the tool exception in `answer_from_live_services`, which is caught,
+# logged and then paraphrased by the model -- so it cannot be recovered from
+# the text. Propagating it out of the live path is recorded as follow-up work.
 TRANSIENT = (
     "service error",
     "could not complete that lookup",
-    "could not find out",
 )
 
 
diff --git a/tests/evaluation/test_answer_sweep.py b/tests/evaluation/test_answer_sweep.py
index 01ffd77..f7bfaa2 100644
--- a/tests/evaluation/test_answer_sweep.py
+++ b/tests/evaluation/test_answer_sweep.py
@@ -12,7 +12,14 @@
 
 import pytest
 
-from evaluation.answer_sweep import EXPECTATIONS, Expectation, _contains, run
+from evaluation.answer_sweep import (
+    EXPECTATIONS,
+    Expectation,
+    Result,
+    _contains,
+    _looks_transient,
+    run,
+)
 
 
 class StubGraph:
@@ -250,3 +257,24 @@ def test_a_variant_guard_accepts_a_variant_named_in_a_list() -> None:
             assert not re.search(
                 pattern, pathway_prose, re.IGNORECASE
             ), f"{expectation.question}: {pattern} accepts pathway prose"
+
+
+def test_a_correct_empty_answer_is_not_treated_as_an_outage() -> None:
+    # `src/reactome_mcp/answer.py` instructs the model: "If the tools do not
+    # answer the question, say plainly what you could not find out." So
+    # "could not find out" is the phrasing of a *correct* negative answer, and
+    # having it in TRANSIENT meant a real failure was retried and could pass on
+    # the second attempt -- the gate quietly forgiving what it exists to catch.
+    correct_negative = (
+        "I could not find out which curator annotated this reaction from the "
+        "tools available."
+    )
+    assert not _looks_transient(
+        Result(expectation=EXPECTATIONS[0], answer=correct_negative)
+    )
+    # The literal this repository emits itself on a failed lookup still counts.
+    outage = (
+        "I could not complete that lookup against the live Reactome services. "
+        "Please try rephrasing the question."
+    )
+    assert _looks_transient(Result(expectation=EXPECTATIONS[0], answer=outage))