DuckDuckGo · AI answers
DuckAssistBot
DuckDuckGo’s real-time crawler for AI-assisted answers with citations. If DuckAssistBot is blocked, you will not be a Duck.ai source.
- Operator
- DuckDuckGo
- Traffic type
- AI answers
- Verification
- Not independently verifiable
- robots.txt
- Honors robots.txt
Usually means: Live fetches when someone asks an assistant a question. If these bots cannot reach the page, you cannot be the citation in that answer.
User-agent
robots.txt and most WAF rules match the token, not the full Mozilla string. Operators often wrap DuckAssistBot in extra product or version text.
DuckAssistBot
What DuckAssistBot does
DuckAssistBot fetches pages to ground DuckDuckGo’s AI-assisted answers and attach citations. It is an answer bot, not a training crawler.
How to get discovered
Allow DuckAssistBot, return clean article HTML, and keep a sitemap so the engine can also discover the URL when it is not typed in.
Why DuckAssistBot might skip you
robots Disallow, JS-only content, or a WAF that treats unfamiliar AI UAs as scrapers while still allowing Googlebot.
robots.txt rule
Allow this token on public pages you want retrieved or cited. A CDN “Block AI bots” toggle can still 403 it after robots.txt says Allow.
# Keep DuckAssistBot eligible to fetch this site
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /DuckDuckGo has not published a machine-readable range file for this token. Do not treat the user-agent alone as proof of identity.
Sources
JavaScript: reads raw HTML only.
DuckAssistBot FAQ
What is DuckAssistBot?
DuckAssistBot fetches pages to ground DuckDuckGo’s AI-assisted answers and attach citations. It is an answer bot, not a training crawler.
Should I allow DuckAssistBot in robots.txt?
Yes if you want DuckDuckGo to be able to fetch and cite this site. Blocking DuckAssistBot is how pages stay invisible to that product even when Googlebot still crawls them.
How do I know a request is really DuckAssistBot?
DuckDuckGo has not published a range file for this token. Treat the user-agent as a claimed identity, and do not build a hard IP allowlist from blog posts or screenshots.
Letting DuckAssistBot in is the start. Getting cited is the job.
Rankealo checks whether AI crawlers can reach you, then publishes pages built to be retrieved and quoted in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
