DuckAssistBot: DuckDuckGo's fetch for a person
DuckAssistBot belongs to DuckDuckGo. It opens a page at the moment a person asks an assistant about it. It doesn't crawl on its own. When it is turned away, the assistant can't read your page while answering, so it answers from memory or from other sites.
| Operator | DuckDuckGo |
|---|---|
| Used for | DuckAssist |
| Type | Fetch for a person |
| robots.txt name | DuckAssistBot |
| User agent | DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html) |
| Published IP ranges | https://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.json |
| Official documentation | duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckassistbot |
DuckDuckGo says the data is used for AI-assisted answers that cite their sources and is not used to train AI models.
Allow or block DuckAssistBot in robots.txt
To block it on the whole site:
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (useful when a rule for all bots would block it):
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /DuckDuckGo says a disallow takes effect after 72 hours and does not affect organic search rankings.
robots.txt is a request, not a wall. A CDN or firewall rule can turn a bot away even when robots.txt allows it, and nothing in the file will show that.
The free check requests your home page as a browser and as AI bots, reads your robots.txt and shows what gets blocked. No sign-up.
Check my siteIs it really DuckAssistBot?
Anyone can send a request with this bot's name. DuckDuckGo publishes the IP ranges its requests come from, so a request that carries the name from another address is an impostor. You can check a request's IP address against that list.
See DuckAssistBot on your own site
DuckAssistBot doesn't run JavaScript, so analytics scripts never record it. AI Visibility in PageLens reads it from your server or CDN and shows which pages it requested, when, and which requests ended in a 404.