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DuckDuckGoChecked 29 Oct 2026

DuckAssistBot

Reads pages in real time for DuckDuckGo's AI answers, which cite their sources. DuckDuckGo says it is not used to train AI.

Run by
DuckDuckGo
Used for
Search and AI answers
Follows robots.txt
Yes
Shut out by
8% of top websites

What blocking it changes

DuckDuckGo stops crawling the site for AI answers within 72 hours. The site's ranking in ordinary results does not change.

"This data is not used in any way to train AI models."

DuckDuckGo, read 29 Oct 2026
Figure 1How many shut out DuckAssistBot while letting Googlebot in
Most visited websites8%53 of 669
S&P 500 companies0%2 of 410
From our two studies of 29 October 2026: the 669 most visited websites and the 410 S&P 500 companies whose robots.txt we could read. 53 of the websites and 7 of the companies name DuckAssistBot in the file. The website study, the S&P 500 study.

The lines to copy

To shut it out
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /
To let it in
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /

A crawler follows only the lines under the User-agent line that names it, and the lines under User-agent: * only when no line names it. So lines for one crawler do not change the rules for the others.

DuckDuckGo publishes the addresses it crawls from, so a request can be checked against them: the list.