AI crawlers · Answer engines
DuckAssistBot
DuckAssistBot is the answer-engine crawler run by DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo DuckAssist. Its operator documents how to verify it: published IP ranges.
| User-agent token | DuckAssistBot |
| Operator | DuckDuckGo |
| What it does | DuckDuckGo DuckAssist |
| Kind | answer-engine crawler |
| Can a request be verified? | Yes — operator documented |
| Verification source | published IP ranges |
| In a CrawlCheck scan | Read from robots.txt; a refusal is scored |
Allow or block it in robots.txt
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Disallow: /
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Allow: /
Add a group that names it: "User-agent: DuckAssistBot" followed by "Disallow: /". A crawler follows only the most specific group that names it, so once a group names DuckAssistBot, rules under "User-agent: *" no longer apply to it; repeat in that group any Disallow lines you still want.
What blocking it changes
Yes. It is how DuckDuckGo reaches a page to answer a question or to build the index its answers read, so refusing it stops that engine reading the site.
Other agents from DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckBot— indexes pages for DuckDuckGo search
See what DuckAssistBot and every other named agent receive from your own site: run a free scan. The full catalogue is on AI crawlers and as JSON at /ai-crawlers.json.