DuckAssistBot

What is DuckAssistBot?

About

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. You can see how often DuckAssistBot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

AI assistants make one-off visits to websites based on user requests, rather than crawling the web in any automatic fashion. This allows the underlying LLM to incorporate up-to-date information outside of its training data in its answers, using a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Type

AI Assistant
Intelligently fetches content on behalf of a user

Detail

Operated By DuckDuckGo
Last Updated 20 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

4%
4% of top websites are blocking DuckAssistBot
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
DuckAssistBot normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Assistants

Top Visited Website Categories

Food and Drink
Health
Autos and Vehicles
Hobbies and Leisure
Real Estate
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Robots.txt

Should I Block DuckAssistBot?

Probably not. AI assistants visit websites directly on behalf of human users, so blocking them will effectively block those users. This could lead to a poor user experience and possible negative sentiment about your website. Not blocking AI assistants will allow more human users to use your website as they choose.

How Do I Block DuckAssistBot?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block DuckAssistBot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent String DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html) 
# robots.txt
# This should block DuckAssistBot

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

References