Yes. It tells 2 AI crawlers to stay out.
Read from uct.ac.za 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 Cape Town written down whether models may read what it publishes?
Copied from https://uct.ac.za/robots.txt on 2026-08-24.
User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: / User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /secret.html Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /admin/ Disallow: /search Disallow: /search/ Disallow: /*/search Disallow: /*/search/ Disallow: /*/search$ Disallow: /*/search? Disallow: /*?*search= # sitemap.xml Sitemap: https://uct.ac.za/sitemap.xml
| Operator | In its robots.txt | User-agent |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | blocked | GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User |
| Anthropic | not mentioned | ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, anthropic-ai |
| not mentioned | Google-Extended | |
| Meta | not mentioned | meta-externalagent, FacebookBot |
| Perplexity | not mentioned | PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User |
| Common Crawl | not mentioned | CCBot |
| ByteDance | blocked | Bytespider |
| Amazon | not mentioned | Amazonbot |
| Apple | not mentioned | Applebot-Extended |
| Cohere | not mentioned | cohere-ai |
| Diffbot | not mentioned | Diffbot |
| You.com | not mentioned | 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 University of Cape Town 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.
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.
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.