Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but just to clarify things for me…
When a URL is requested via an AJAX call does that URL go through the same rewrite process as any other browser request?
Because it makes sense to me that they would be, what with mod_rewrite being a server side module and given that an AJAX request still originates from a client browser.
Yes. As a browser loading a page, an Ajax request causes an HTTP request, which causes the server to process the request as it would any other. mod_rewrite will act exactly the same.