What is the eligibility layer in AI search?
Eligibility is a yes/no question asked before any others: can an AI engine reach your pages, and can it read them once it arrives? If the answer is no, nothing else on the site matters, because every layer after this one assumes the engine already got the page.
Before an engine can consider naming you, it has to be able to reach and read you. That sounds trivial and is where a surprising number of businesses fail, for want of anything sophisticated: a robots.txt file nobody has read since the site launched, a JavaScript-rendered page that returns nothing to a non-executing fetch, or a CDN rule blocking a crawler someone thought was a scraper.
The failure is invisible from the inside. Your site works perfectly in a browser. It simply is not legible to the thing you are trying to be recommended by.
What does Mindflow check at the eligibility layer?
Four checks, made explicitly rather than assumed: which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows, whether the page renders without JavaScript, whether a CDN or firewall rule is blocking access independently of robots.txt, and whether the platform the site runs on gives you the control you think it does.
| What we check | How we check it, and why it matters |
|---|---|
| Which AI crawlers are allowed | Explicitly, per crawler, as a decision rather than an inherited default. |
| Whether the page renders without JavaScript | If the content only appears after execution, treat it as content that may not be read. |
| Whether a CDN or firewall rule is blocking access independently of robots.txt | This one is common and rarely suspected, because the site owner never sees it. |
| Whether the platform allows the control you think it does | Crawler and structured-data control differ meaningfully between Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento and custom builds, so this is a platform-aware check rather than one robots.txt read. |
Why is eligibility layer one rather than layer six?
Eligibility comes first because it gates the other five layers instead of adding to them. Every other layer assumes the engine can read the page. Entity work, content work, citation work, measurement, all of it is wasted effort if the answer to “can it see you” is no.
It is also the cheapest layer to fix, which is a fortunate combination: highest consequence, lowest cost, and almost never the thing an agency leads with because it does not look like marketing.
Read in order, or jump
Twelve chapters, sequenced the way the work actually runs. The opening four carry the structure; the platform chapters close with two surfaces we choose not to score, and the reasoning for that.
01 How AI search picks local businesses 02 Eligibility: can AI even see your site? 03 Robots.txt: block AI crawlers or allow them? 04 Measuring AI visibility honestly 05 Entity foundations for local businesses 06 Reviews as AI input 07 Citation surfaces: where AI engines look 08 Getting ChatGPT to recommend your business 09 Showing up in Perplexity 10 Showing up in Google AI Overviews 11 Showing up in Gemini 12 Copilot, and why we don't sample itSee where you actually stand
Everything measured in this guide, run against your business, free.
Get my free Visibility CheckRankings are never guaranteed. Anything we could not trace to a primary source is absent from this page, not estimated. The audit runs the same six layers described on the pricing page, and Share of Answer is scored quarterly.