Abstract Largely motivated by Semantic Web applications, many highly scalable, but incomplete, query answering systems have been recently developed. Evaluating the scalability-completeness trade-off exhibited by such systems is an important requirement for many applications. In this paper, we address the problem of formally comparing complete and incomplete systems given an ontology schema (or TBox) T . We formulate precise conditions on TBoxes T expressed in the EL, QL or RL pro?le of OWL 2 under which an incomplete system is indistinguishable from a complete one w.r.t. T , regardless of the input query and data. Our results also allow us to quantify the “degree of incompleteness” of a given system w.r.t. T as well as to automatically identify concrete queries and data patterns for which the incomplete system will miss answers.