What is DuckAssistBot?

How often is DuckAssistBot impersonated?

For the median organisation, 3% of requests claiming to be DuckAssistBot failed verification.

Measured between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.

This directory measures requests between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be DuckAssistBot? Check its IP address.

Should you block DuckAssistBot?

Allow it if

you want DuckDuckGo's AI answers to cite your pages.

Block it if

you do not want your pages used in AI-assisted answers.

What blocking changes

Your pages stop being used for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers. Regular search uses DuckDuckBot.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. DuckDuckGo says a robots.txt opt-out takes effect within 72 hours.

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be DuckAssistBot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.