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Guardrails are eligibility rules on a treatment that determine which users are allowed to receive it. A user must satisfy all guardrail conditions to be eligible for a given treatment. Guardrails let you control targeting precisely — ensuring the right message reaches the right audience without over-messaging or serving irrelevant content.

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How Guardrails Work

Guardrails are defined using Data Fields. Each guardrail is a condition expressed as a comparison: When a treatment has multiple guardrail conditions, all conditions must be satisfied for the user to be eligible.

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When a User Has No Value for a Field

A guardrail on a user attribute can only be evaluated for users who have a value for that attribute. For everyone else, the checkbox OR “<field>” is not available shown under the condition decides what happens: Example: country is not any of AF, BY, CN keeps a treatment away from those countries. A user with no country value at all does not qualify while the box is unchecked. Check the box to keep that user eligible: the remaining conditions then decide, the same as for a user from an allowed country. The option exists only for user attribute fields. Event-based conditions and treatment-interaction conditions have no missing-value state. In bulk CSV upload the same setting is the column Apply qualification N if attribute not available.

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Guardrails vs. Goals

Guardrails control who can receive a treatment. Goals define what outcome the treatment is trying to drive.

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Treatment Selection with Guardrails

When a user makes an API request for treatments, Auxia first filters all Live treatments down to those the user is eligible for (based on guardrails). It then applies its decisioning algorithms to select the optimal treatment from the eligible set. This means guardrails define the candidate pool — Auxia’s algorithms make the final selection within that pool.

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Frequency Caps and Suppression

In addition to attribute-based guardrails, Auxia also supports:
  • Frequency caps — Limit how often a user can receive a specific treatment (e.g., no more than once every 3 days).
  • Post-interaction suppression — Automatically suppress a treatment for a user after they have clicked or dismissed it (e.g., do not re-show a dismissed treatment for 3 days).
These are configured at the treatment level and work alongside guardrail conditions.
  • Treatments — guardrails are set on individual treatments
  • Data Fields — the data used to evaluate guardrail conditions
  • Journeys — journeys group treatments; guardrails apply per treatment
  • Goals — the outcome that eligible treatments optimize toward
How-to guides: Managing Treatments