What is DuckAssistBot?
It crawls pages in real time for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers, which cite their sources. DuckDuckGo says the data is not used to train AI models.
Fetches a page because a person asked an assistant about it, right now. Operators often say robots.txt does not apply to these user-triggered fetches.
DuckDuckGo says an opt-out takes effect after 72 hours and does not affect organic search rankings.
DuckAssistBot user agent
DuckDuckGo documents this user agent for DuckAssistBot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)Should you block DuckAssistBot?
Usually allow it. Each fetch is a person asking about your page right now, which is close to a visit. Blocking it in robots.txt may not stop it, since operators often treat these fetches as the person’s own.
How to block DuckAssistBot in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really DuckAssistBot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
DuckDuckGo publishes the IP ranges DuckAssistBot crawls from. A request that claims to be DuckAssistBot from any other address is not DuckAssistBot.
See when DuckAssistBot reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against DuckDuckGo’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.