One aggregate over a filtered population. Returns numbers, never company rows.

This is what makes an analytical question answerable at all: shipping the matching companies instead would cost an agent tens of thousands of tokens and then ask it to do arithmetic over thousands of rows. It is also what keeps §8.5's "never bulk" line intact while still answering the question — the conclusion is given away, the dataset is not.

Every response carries matched_companies beside rows_with_metric. An average reported without both describes a population the caller did not ask about.