DuckAssistBot: what it is and how to block or allow it

What DuckAssistBot does

DuckAssistBot fetches pages in real time for DuckAssist, DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers, which cite their sources. DuckDuckGo says the data it collects isn't used to train AI models.

• DuckDuckGo gives publishers who have trouble opting out an address: [email protected]. Source

Does DuckAssistBot follow robots.txt?

Yes. DuckDuckGo says publishers can opt out of being a source for AI-assisted answers by disallowing DuckAssistBot in robots.txt. It stops crawling 72 hours after the change.

How to block or allow DuckAssistBot

Block it from the whole site:

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

Keep it out of one folder only:

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /private/

A crawler that finds a group with its own name follows only that group and ignores User-agent: *. If your * group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines in the DuckAssistBot group. robots.txt works per host, so add the rules to each subdomain you want covered.

Test the result with the robots.txt checker, or write a new file with the robots.txt generator.

What blocking DuckAssistBot changes

Your site stops being a source for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers. DuckDuckGo says organic search rankings aren't affected.

Where to see DuckAssistBot visits

Most bots never appear in Google Analytics. Many don't run JavaScript, so the analytics tag never loads, and Google Analytics 4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders. Your server or CDN logs record every request with its user agent, so search them for the bot's name.

OneLence AI visibility shows which pages AI crawlers read and fetch for answers, next to the visitors AI assistants send you and the ones that convert.

Other bots from DuckDuckGo

• DuckDuckBot: DuckDuckBot is DuckDuckGo's own crawler. Most standard links in DuckDuckGo come from Bing, so Bingbot matters more for your DuckDuckGo results.