DuckAssistBot
DuckAssistBot is a bot that fetches single pages on demand for an AI assistant, and its operator has not been publicly identified. 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 usin…. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be DuckAssistBot can be checked against a published IP range file.
DuckAssistBot at a glance
| User agent | DuckAssistBotToken only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header. |
|---|---|
| Operator | Not publicly identified |
| Purpose | Assistant fetchers |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | Published IP range file DuckDuckGo documents the agent and the addresses it fetches from on its help pages. https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckassistbot/ |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | DuckAssistBot |
| Operator documentation | https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckassistbot/ |
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 usin…
Allow or block DuckAssistBot
Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking DuckAssistBot means a person who asks about one of your URLs gets an error instead of a summary. That is a support and reputation trade-off, not a training one.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really DuckAssistBot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy DuckAssistBot precisely because site owners allow it. DuckDuckGo documents the agent and the addresses it fetches from on its help pages.
Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.
Related crawlers
Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand
Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.