DuckAssistBot
DuckDuckGo's search crawler.
- Vendor
- DuckDuckGo
- robots.txt token
DuckAssistBot- Purpose
- Search
- Respects robots.txt
- See vendor documentation
- Source
- Vendor documentation
What it does
DuckDuckGo describes DuckAssistBot as a crawler that gathers pages in real time for its AI-assisted answers, which prominently cite their sources.
It says this data is not used in any way to train AI models.
What blocking it changes
DuckAssistBot is how DuckDuckGo's answer engine indexes pages, so blocking it removes your pages from that engine's answers.
DuckDuckGo says that once you disallow DuckAssistBot it will stop crawling your site, and that the change takes effect after 72 hours. It says opting out does not affect organic search rankings.
The effect of blocking DuckAssistBot on citations has not been measured. The Tow Center study covered OpenAI and Perplexity only.
robots.txt
Block it
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /Allow it
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /Check your own site
The free Chompr.io extension shows each AI search crawler's status for the page you are on.