DuckAssistBot
DuckDuckGo's real-time fetcher for DuckAssist, the AI-assisted answers that appear above its search results.
At a glance
- Operator
- DuckDuckGo
- Category
-
Answer engine
Fetches your page in real time to answer a user who is asking right now. Blocking it removes you from those answers — this is the one to leave open.
- User-Agent token
-
DuckAssistBot - robots.txt token
DuckAssistBot- Respects robots.txt
- Documented as compliant
- Operator docs
- duckduckgo.com
What DuckAssistBot does
Should you block DuckAssistBot?
Our take
Leave it open. Answer-engine fetchers only run because a person just asked a question, and the page they read is the page that gets cited. Being the source is the entire goal — blocking here buys you nothing and costs you the mention.
How to block DuckAssistBot
Add the rule below to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain
(yourdomain.com/robots.txt). Use the DuckAssistBot token rather than the raw
User-Agent string, and repeat the rule on every subdomain you want covered.
New to the file? Read what robots.txt is first.
Block DuckAssistBot
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Disallow: /
Allow DuckAssistBot explicitly
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Allow: /
A note on what this does and doesn't do. robots.txt is a request, not a lock —
it works because well-behaved crawlers choose to read it. It also isn't retroactive: anything already
fetched stays fetched. If you need a hard stop, block at your firewall or CDN as well.
How MetaPilot handles DuckAssistBot
MetaPilot detects DuckAssistBot in your edge logs, so you see its real hits on your
real pages rather than a guess: how often it visits, which URLs it takes, and how that trend moves week to
week. From the same screen you flip DuckAssistBot between allow and deny with one click —
MetaPilot rewrites only its own managed section of your
robots.txt and serves it at the edge, so the change is live on the crawler's next visit with
no deploy and no touching your own rules.
See AI-crawler analytics or follow the guide to
monitor and control AI crawlers.
Related crawlers
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The agent behind Gemini's Deep Research mode, which reads pages as it works through a multi-step research task for one user.
MistralAI-User
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The fetcher Mistral's assistant uses to open a page when a user's question needs it.
ChatGPT-User
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The fetcher ChatGPT uses to open a specific page in real time while answering someone.
FAQ
What is DuckAssistBot?
DuckDuckGo's real-time fetcher for DuckAssist, the AI-assisted answers that appear above its search results.
DuckAssistBot crawls pages in real time to generate DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers, which prominently cite the sources they were built from. DuckDuckGo states this data is not used in any way to train AI models. It is a citation surface first and last.
Does DuckAssistBot respect robots.txt?
Yes — DuckDuckGo documents that DuckAssistBot honours robots.txt. A Disallow for the DuckAssistBot token is respected.
How do I block DuckAssistBot?
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain:
User-agent: DuckAssistBotDisallow: /
Use the DuckAssistBot token, not the raw User-Agent string, and repeat the rule on every subdomain you want covered.
Will blocking DuckAssistBot hurt my traffic?
Blocking removes you as a potential source for DuckAssist answers, and with it the prominent citation. DuckDuckGo states that opting out does not affect organic rankings and will not change whether you appear in its ordinary search results, so the loss is narrow but real. Changes take about 72 hours to apply.
Ask an AI whether to block DuckAssistBot