Does DuckDuckBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that DuckDuckBot reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.

How do I verify a request really came from DuckDuckBot?

DuckDuckGo publishes the crawler addresses on its help pages. The reference is published at https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduckbot/.

How do I block DuckDuckBot?

Add the DuckDuckBot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.

IPScanner

AI search crawlers

DuckDuckBot

DuckDuckBot is a bot operated by DuckDuckGo that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. DuckDuckBot crawls for DuckDuckGo's own index. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be DuckDuckBot can be checked against a published IP range file.

DuckDuckBot at a glance

Reference data for the DuckDuckBot crawler
User agent	`DuckDuckBot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	DuckDuckGo
Purpose	Search indexing
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	Published IP range file DuckDuckGo publishes the crawler addresses on its help pages. https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduckbot/
Crawl pattern	Light, most results come from partner indexes.
Robots.txt tokens	`DuckDuckBot`
Operator documentation	https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduckbot/

DuckDuckBot crawls for DuckDuckGo's own index. It is distinct from DuckAssistBot, which fetches pages to answer questions in DuckDuckGo's AI assistant.

robots.txt

Allow or block DuckDuckBot

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.

Block DuckDuckBot

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow DuckDuckBot

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking DuckDuckBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really DuckDuckBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy DuckDuckBot precisely because site owners allow it. DuckDuckGo publishes the crawler addresses 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.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

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Agentscan

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.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

FAQ