What is DuckDuckBot?

How often is DuckDuckBot impersonated?

For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be DuckDuckBot failed verification.

Measured between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 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 14 July 2026 and 10 October 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 DuckDuckBot? Check its IP address.

Should you block DuckDuckBot?

Allow it if

you want to appear in DuckDuckGo search.

Block it if

a section should never appear in DuckDuckGo.

What blocking changes

DuckDuckGo stops crawling your pages for its search results.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. DuckDuckGo documents robots.txt control for DuckDuckBot.

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /

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