Eligibility surface

The full set of machine-readable facts required for a system to determine whether a user or order qualifies for an offer, including region, account state, product restrictions, return-policy label, mandatory legal warnings, age/age-verification requirements, and quantity limits.

StoreSteady treats eligibility surface as a reference term because Missing eligibility fields: Required eligibility attributes are absent from feed/markup.

• Missing eligibility fields changes what a crawler, shopping channel, or AI assistant can safely infer about the merchant surface.
• Without a named category, operators tend to treat eligibility surface as generic AI noise instead of a reproducible finding with evidence and a validation path.

• structured-data eligibility fields; feed eligibility attributes; UCP eligibility responses; mandatory legal warnings exposed in machine-readable form.

Audit every offer for the eligibility-attribute floor (region, account state, restrictions, warnings, return-policy label). Compare pre-cart agent-visible eligibility to actual checkout enforcement; flag any gap.

• A product where the "members only" condition is shown to the user as text but not exposed in any structured form.
• An age-restricted product (alcohol, tobacco) with no machine-readable age-verification requirement.

1. Identify the merchant-controlled source that creates the eligibility surface signal.
2. Reconcile visible copy, machine-readable data, policy text, feed state, and checkout behavior where the term applies.
3. Keep the fix high-level in public docs; detailed remediation belongs inside paid scan workflows.

Rerun the same evidence capture used for detection. The finding is validated only when the original eligibility surface signal no longer reproduces and adjacent source surfaces still agree.

• Google UCP - product feed eligibility attribute requirements →
• Schema.org `Offer.eligibleRegion`, `eligibleQuantity`, `eligibleCustomerType` →

• Offer interpretability →
• Agent-readable legal warning →
• Consent checkpoint →

• StoreSteady public methodology →
• Google UCP - product feed eligibility attribute requirements →
• Schema.org `Offer.eligibleRegion`, `eligibleQuantity`, `eligibleCustomerType` →