Bots by company
DuckDuckGo bots and crawlers
DuckDuckGo runs a privacy-focused search engine and the DuckAssist AI answer feature.
DuckDuckGo bots at a glance
- DuckDuckGo runs 2 bots listed in this directory.
- They belong to: AI Assistant Fetchers, Search Engine Crawlers.
- Each DuckDuckGo bot has its own robots.txt token, so each purpose can be allowed or blocked separately.
- Website: duckduckgo.com
Every DuckDuckGo bot
| Bot | Group | Purpose | robots.txt | For GEO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DuckAssistBot | AI Assistant Fetchers | AI assistantOfficial docs | Yes | Allow |
| DuckDuckBot | Search Engine Crawlers | Search indexOfficial docs | Yes | Allow |
Block or allow all DuckDuckGo bots
The rules below name every DuckDuckGo token in this directory. To block training but keep AI search, delete the search and assistant tokens from the block rule.
robots.txt: block
# Block all DuckDuckGo bots
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow all DuckDuckGo bots
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep all DuckDuckGo bots out of private areas only
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to all DuckDuckGo bots
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(DuckAssistBot|DuckDuckBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to all DuckDuckGo bots
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (DuckAssistBot|DuckDuckBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "DuckAssistBot") or (http.user_agent contains "DuckDuckBot")See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
