Validating an email input from form field before submit using JQuery, AJAX, and PHP

Question

I have a form and one of the fields is an email with id email and after the user inputs their email and clicks outside the field, I wish to get the value of the email and then use ajax to pass that value to another php file that will run a wordpress function called email_exists() and then pass that result back to ajax. Right now I just want to console log the result value and then later I will add additinal jquery to alert the user in the form.

I have my current code below and it is not showing anything in the console even if I put an email that does exist on my wordpress site and I can't figure out why. Any help would be great, thanks!

employees.php

<script>
$(function() {     
    
    $("#email").blur(function () {
    var email = $(this).val();
        url: 'validation.php',
        type: ' POST',
        data: {
            email: email
        },
        success: function(response) {
                console.log("response");
        },
        error: function(response) {
                console.log("response");
        }
    });
});
<script>

validation.php

<?php
$response = email_exists($_POST['email']);
echo $response;
?>