Page hits and contents of an Ajax based website? Is every Ajax hit a valid page hit?

[Will]

In an Ajax based website, does the link that loads contents based on Ajax counted as a page hit? E.g the php/asp page that is hit based on Ajax url, counted as a valid page count? If not then we loose hits because of Ajax. It will be hard to sell an Ajax based website because we loose valid hits that would be otherwise a page count.

2nd Question, does that content which is load only through Ajax (and also involves some search criteria as well) can be directly accessed by a search engine such as Google. It seems like it can be but just want to make it sure. If not again we'll customers because they wont be able find that contents through search engine.

Thanks