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 2 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

Health
Food and Drink
Computers and Electronics
Online Communities
Pets and Animals
How Do I Get These Insights for My Website?
Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.
Set Up Agent Analytics

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.

How Do I Block All AI Assistants?
Serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new AI assistants automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt
User Agent String DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html) 
# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: DuckAssistBot # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/duckassistbot
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.

References