DuckAssistBot

Last updated 16 hours ago.

DuckAssistBot is used by DuckDuckGo's DuckAssist feature to fetch content and generate realtime AI answers to user searches. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to see how often DuckAssistBot visits your website.

Detail

Operator	DuckDuckGo
Documentation	http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html

Type

AI Assistant

Intelligently fetches content on behalf of a user

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).

Analytics

Visits to Your Website

Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with agent analytics.

Set Up Agent Analytics

Other Websites

1% of top websites are blocking DuckAssistBot

Learn How →

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?

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 Token	Description
`DuckAssistBot`	Should match instances of DuckAssistBot

# robots.txt
# This should block DuckAssistBot

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /