DuckDuckGo · Answers
DuckAssistBot
Two claims on DuckDuckGo's page carry this entry, one negative and one positive. The negative is flatter than most vendors manage ("This data is not used in any way to train AI models," with no *may*, no hedge), and the positive is that the pages it fetches in real time feed AI-assisted answers "which prominently cite their sources." The fetch therefore exists to attribute rather than to absorb, which also separates it from DuckDuckBot, DuckDuckGo's older and quite separate search crawler. Verification has exactly one rung available: no reverse DNS is documented, no IPv6 appears in either source, and the two published lists disagree: the help page inlines roughly 300 bare IPv4 addresses while `duckassistbot.json` carries 600-plus `/32` prefixes and a much more recent timestamp, so the JSON is the one to trust.
- Operated by
- DuckDuckGo
- Purpose
- Answers
- robots.txt token
- DuckAssistBot
- Verification
- IP verified
Fetches a page in real time to answer a question someone just asked.
How to verify DuckAssistBot
DuckDuckGo publishes the IP ranges DuckAssistBot crawls from, and we fetch that list on a schedule. A request claiming to be DuckAssistBot can therefore be checked against 486 published ranges: one that does not match is not this crawler.
Published ranges last confirmed by us on .
User agent
DuckDuckGo publishes this user agent for DuckAssistBot. Match on the DuckAssistBot product token rather than the whole string: vendors revise the surrounding version and URL fragments without notice.
DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)robots.txt for DuckAssistBot
Yes, with an unusually long propagation window stated up front: publishers may opt out of being a potential source for AI-assisted answers by disallowing the user agent, and "the change will take effect after 72 hours," after which DuckAssistBot stops crawling. DuckDuckGo gives an escalation address, `crawling@duckduckgo.com`, for cases where it does not. Nothing is stated either way about `crawl-delay` or meta robots tags.
Block
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /robots.txt is a request, not an enforcement mechanism. It is honoured by convention, and a crawler that ignores it is stopped at your edge, not in a text file.
What blocking DuckAssistBot costs you
What you give up is a cited slot in DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers, and because those answers cite sources prominently, that slot is a linked attribution rather than an uncredited use of your text. What you do not give up is search presence: DuckDuckGo states it twice over, that opting out "does not impact organic search rankings and will not affect whether or not websites appear in our search results." Since the vendor also disclaims training use outright, allowing this token buys citation exposure without the training trade-off that usually rides along with it, which makes the block unusually cheap to reverse if you change your mind, subject to the 72-hour lag in both directions.