Who reads it · no. 458University of California, Santa Cruz

Yes. It tells 8 AI crawlers to stay out.

Read from ucsc.edu 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 University of California, Santa Cruz written down whether models may read what it publishes?

What its file says

Copied from https://www.ucsc.edu/robots.txt on 2026-08-24.

User-agent: GPTBot
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: anthropic-ai
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: Google-Extended
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: CCBot
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: Bytespider
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
Crawl-delay: 120
User-agent: cohere-ai
Crawl-delay: 120

Operator by operator

OperatorIn its robots.txtUser-agent
OpenAIblockedGPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User
AnthropicblockedClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, anthropic-ai
GoogleblockedGoogle-Extended
Metablockedmeta-externalagent, FacebookBot
Perplexitynot mentionedPerplexityBot, Perplexity-User
Common CrawlblockedCCBot
ByteDanceblockedBytespider
Amazonnot mentionedAmazonbot
AppleblockedApplebot-Extended
Cohereblockedcohere-ai
Diffbotnot mentionedDiffbot
You.comnot mentionedYouBot

"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.

The question this does not answer

Whether University of California, Santa Cruz 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.

Ask them

No statutory route here, so this is an ordinary email to the admissions office. A refusal is itself an answer worth recording.

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.

And on your side of it

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.