DuckAssistBot
DuckDuckGo's AI crawler. Blocking it takes you out of DuckAssist answers.
| Operator | DuckDuckGo |
|---|---|
| What it does | Search & citations |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, per its operator's docs |
| Governs | Other AI assistants |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 13 August 2026 |
What blocking it costs you
What to know
DuckDuckGo states that content crawled here is never used for model training — this is real-time crawling for citations only, so the usual training-versus-visibility trade-off does not apply.
Rule changes are honoured within roughly 72 hours, which is faster than most and worth knowing when you are testing a fix.
The robots.txt rules
To block DuckAssistBot:
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly — worth doing when your file also contains a blanket User-agent: * disallow, since the most specific matching group wins and a token with no group of its own falls back to the wildcard:
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /If neither rule is present, DuckAssistBot is allowed. That is the default, and it is why an accidental block is nearly always something that was added rather than something that was forgotten — usually a snippet copied from a blog post that listed more tokens than the author intended to block.
Is it blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt is only the half you can read. A CDN or bot-management rule can turn DuckAssistBot away while your file still says it is welcome, and that mismatch is invisible from the front of the site. We check both layers separately and tell you which one is doing what.
We request two things: your robots.txt and your homepage. No other pages, ever.
Official sources
- DuckDuckGo’s crawler documentation
- Published IP ranges — the only way to verify a request claiming this user agent really came from DuckDuckGo