DuckAssistBot
DuckDuckGo · AI search · robots.txt: Yes
Fetches pages in real time for DuckDuckGo Search's AI-assisted answers, which prominently cite their sources.
Block DuckAssistBot
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /Blocking DuckAssistBot opts your site out of being a source for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers. DuckDuckGo says it does not affect organic search rankings or whether your site appears in its search results.
Allow DuckAssistBot
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block DuckAssistBot. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Already have a robots.txt? Paste it into the robots.txt checker to see whether it blocks DuckAssistBot on a given path, and which line decides.
Facts
- Operator
- DuckDuckGo
- Purpose
- AI search index
DuckDuckGo says it crawls pages in real time for the AI-assisted answers in DuckDuckGo Search, which cite their sources, and that the data is not used to train AI models.
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. DuckDuckGo says a Disallow for DuckAssistBot takes effect after 72 hours, after which DuckAssistBot stops crawling the site.
- In your server logs
- The user-agent string contains "DuckAssistBot/1.2".
- How to verify it
- Match the IP against the DuckAssistBot addresses DuckDuckGo publishes on its help page and as JSON.
Published list: duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.json — 486 IPv4 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 1 Sep 2026. Always match against the live list; operators update them. To count real and fake DuckAssistBot requests in your own server log against this list, drop the log into the log reader.
What DuckDuckGo says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“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.”
“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.”
“If you’re a publisher, you may opt out of being a potential source for AI-assisted answers by modifying the robots.txt file for your domain(s).”
“Opting out of DuckAssistBot does not impact organic search rankings and will not affect whether or not websites appear in our search results.”
“The crawler’s user agent will appear as DuckAssistBot/1.2;”
“and originates from the following IP addresses (also available in JSON at”
Sources
- DuckDuckGo Help Pages: Is DuckAssistBot related to DuckDuckGo? — fetched and checked 2026-09-24
- DuckDuckGo: DuckAssistBot IP addresses (duckassistbot.json) — fetched and checked 2026-09-24