DuckAssistBot

DuckDuckGo's crawler for its AI-assisted answers. It fetches pages in real time and DuckDuckGo says the data isn't used to train AI models.

What happens if you block it

Your pages stop being a source for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers. Regular DuckDuckGo rankings are unaffected.

Our take

Allow it if you want to be cited in DuckDuckGo's AI answers.

robots.txt

To block it:

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

To allow it explicitly (useful when a wider rule blocks other bots):

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /

The operator's own words

DuckAssistBot is a web crawler for DuckDuckGo Search that crawls pages in real-time for our AI-assisted answers ... This data is not used in any way to train AI models.DuckDuckGo documentation, checked 2026-10-31

robots.txt allows it, but is it really getting through?

A firewall or CDN rule can reject DuckAssistBot even when robots.txt welcomes it, and nothing in your CMS shows it. Our check sends a live request as DuckAssistBot alongside a normal browser and a Googlebot control, so a bot-verification rule isn't mistaken for a block.