DuckAssistBot

Operator

DuckDuckGo

Type

AI Assistant

Official page

duckduckgo.com

robots.txt token

DuckAssistBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to DuckDuckGo.

Published IP ranges

duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.json

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

Crawls pages in real time for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers. DuckDuckGo says the data isn't used to train AI models.

DuckAssistBot is a web crawler for DuckDuckGo Search that crawls pages in real-time for our AI-assisted answers, which prominently cite their sources. This data is not used in any way to train AI models.

DuckDuckGo

User agent

Requests from DuckAssistBot carry a user agent like this:

DuckAssistBot/1.1; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

DuckAssistBot

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow DuckAssistBot

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

Once you’ve updated the file to disallow the DuckAssistBot user agent, the change will take effect after 72 hours and DuckAssistBot will stop crawling your site.

DuckDuckGo

Once you’ve updated the file to disallow the DuckAssistBot user agent, the change will take effect after 72 hours and DuckAssistBot will stop crawling your site.

DuckDuckGo

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

Opting out doesn't affect DuckDuckGo organic rankings.

Opting out of DuckAssistBot does not impact organic search rankings and will not affect whether or not websites appear in our search results.

DuckDuckGo

How Vireo counts DuckAssistBot

Vireo keeps requests from DuckAssistBot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Search engines, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over DuckAssistBot's user agents.

Sources

• DuckDuckGo: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• DuckAssistBot information page (duckduckgo.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)