What is DuckAssistBot?
DuckAssistBot is a web crawler that scans websites to collect content for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers feature, which generates brief responses to search queries using natural language technology and Wikipedia sources. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
DuckAssistBot fetches one page at a time, the moment someone asks a question it can answer, so it never crawls your site. How much you see depends on how many people use DuckAssistBot and how often they ask about what your site covers. A popular assistant can hit you steadily, while a single user or a niche one stays quiet between occasional spikes.
Overview
| Operated By | DuckDuckGo |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 7, 2026 |
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
As of July 7, 2026, 8% of top websites block DuckAssistBot in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Assistant Traffic
As of July 7, 2026, 1.2% of all web traffic came from AI assistants.
Top Visited Website Categories
This data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
DuckAssistBot's User Agent
| User Agent | DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html) |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block DuckAssistBot
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block DuckAssistBot from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: DuckAssistBot # https://knownagents.com/agents/duckassistbot
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block DuckAssistBot?
Probably not. DuckAssistBot fetches a page when someone asks a question it can answer, and the response cites and links to your site. Blocking it removes you from those answers without improving your Google rankings, because assistants play no part in traditional search indexing. For comparison, 8% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for DuckAssistBot.
Does DuckAssistBot Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. DuckAssistBot is expected to honor robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms DuckAssistBot actually honors it.
Does DuckAssistBot Access Private Content?
It has no way in. DuckAssistBot fetches pages the way an anonymous visitor loads a URL, with no stored logins. Anything behind a paywall or a login stays out of its reach.
Why Is DuckAssistBot Visiting My Website?
Someone asked DuckDuckGo's assistant a question your page can help answer. DuckAssistBot retrieved the page in that moment to ground the answer, usually with a citation linking back to you.
How Can I Tell if DuckAssistBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks DuckAssistBot visits and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper alongside it, then authenticates each visit against DuckAssistBot's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "DuckAssistBot". Look for fetches of individual pages that do not follow a crawl pattern. A log match is still not proof, because any bot can claim to be DuckAssistBot.