How much coverage counts as "critical acclaim" for a self-published series?

[AlexGreene2026]

I'm an indie SF author and I've been looking at the extraordinary-ability criteria for the EB-1A, and I'm stuck on how forums and reviewers weigh "sustained critical acclaim" for self-published work. My series has good reviews on the usual retail sites and a couple of genre blog write-ups, but no press from the bigger genre outlets. For those of you who've been through this: do small genre blogs and podcast interviews carry real weight, or do adjudicators basically ignore anything that isn't from a named publication? Curious what evidence people found actually moved the needle.