Yes. It tells 12 AI crawlers to stay out.
Read from nottingham.ac.uk on 2026-08-24.
You are told to declare whether a model wrote your application. This is the same question pointed the other way: has The University of Nottingham written down whether models may read what it publishes?
Copied from https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/robots.txt on 2026-08-24.
User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: / User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: / User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: / User-agent: cohere-ai Disallow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: / User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: / User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: / User-agent: Applebot-Extended Disallow: / User-agent: Amazonbot Disallow: / User-agent: meta-externalagent Disallow: / User-agent: FacebookBot Disallow: / User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: / User-agent: Diffbot Disallow: / User-agent: YouBot Disallow: /
| Operator | In its robots.txt | User-agent |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | blocked | GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User |
| Anthropic | blocked | ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, anthropic-ai |
| blocked | Google-Extended | |
| Meta | blocked | meta-externalagent, FacebookBot |
| Perplexity | blocked | PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User |
| Common Crawl | blocked | CCBot |
| ByteDance | blocked | Bytespider |
| Amazon | blocked | Amazonbot |
| Apple | blocked | Applebot-Extended |
| Cohere | blocked | cohere-ai |
| Diffbot | blocked | Diffbot |
| You.com | blocked | YouBot |
"Not mentioned" is the ordinary case. Of the 370 institutions whose file could be read, 348 name no AI crawler at all and only 22 block one. Silence here means nobody has written the rule down. An institution can also turn crawlers away at its network edge. A robots file cannot show that. So this page is a finding about the document, and the traffic may say something else.
Whether The University of Nottingham runs a model over your application. Nothing on this page shows that, and no institution in the set publishes it. The difference is that its own reading habits are written down in public and your side of it is not.
The University of Nottingham is a public authority under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The question has to be answered in writing. WhatDoTheyKnow files it for you and publishes the reply. The answer lands in public.
Please state whether any large language model or AI text-detection tool is used at any stage of assessing applications for admission, including sifting, scoring, authenticity checks and interview shortlisting. Please state which tools, at which stage, and whether an applicant is told.
Put a canary in what you send, which tells you if a model processed it, and sign an attestation for what you wrote. Both are on the front page and take about a minute.