Kuldeep Paul

AI search index · DuckDuckGo

DuckAssistBot

Crawls pages in real time for DuckDuckGo's cited AI answers. DuckDuckGo says the data is not used to train AI models. Opt-outs take effect after 72 hours and do not affect organic rankings.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

8%of top sites fully block DuckAssistBot
454sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
68of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
DuckDuckGo
Purpose
AI search index
Used for
DuckDuckGo AI-assisted answers
Obeys robots.txt
Yes
robots.txt token
DuckAssistBot
User-agent string
DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)
IP list
duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.json
Official docs
duckduckgo.com
Feeds
DuckDuckGo (Duck.ai & Search Assist)

Block DuckAssistBot in robots.txt

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

Blocking a search or user-triggered bot removes your pages from that assistant's answers. To opt out of model training only, block the operator's training crawler instead.

Well-known sites that block DuckAssistBot

amazon.com #30, amazonvideo.com #85, msn.com #92, nytimes.com #163, cnn.com #195, theguardian.com #196, launchpad.net #281, amazon.co.uk #326, bloomberg.com #386, amazon.de #387, amazon.co.jp #490, uol.com.br #535, wired.com #570, usatoday.com #617, dailymail.com #619, telegraph.co.uk #629, amazon.fr #632, amazon.ca #633, elpais.com #674, amazon.in #676, primevideo.com #678, lemonde.fr #700, amazon.es #714, dailymail.co.uk #717

Ranks from the Tranco list. Full per-site data in the robots.txt study.

Questions

What is DuckAssistBot?

DuckAssistBot is a ai search index bot operated by DuckDuckGo, used for DuckDuckGo AI-assisted answers. Crawls pages in real time for DuckDuckGo's cited AI answers. DuckDuckGo says the data is not used to train AI models. Opt-outs take effect after 72 hours and do not affect organic rankings.

How do I block DuckAssistBot?

Add "User-agent: DuckAssistBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of each host you want to protect.

Does DuckAssistBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. DuckDuckGo documents that DuckAssistBot honours robots.txt directives.

How many websites block DuckAssistBot?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 8% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed DuckAssistBot.

Analysis using this data

  1. Who blocks AI crawlers? What 10,000 robots.txt files revealPublishers block training, not answers; half of all blocklists leak; Cloudflare writes the most common AI policy.
  2. The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.

← All AI crawlers

How to cite this data

This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:

  1. Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
  2. Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/duckassistbot), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
  3. Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
  4. Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
  5. Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.

In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's DuckAssistBot — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). DuckAssistBot — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/duckassistbot

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "DuckAssistBot — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/duckassistbot.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "DuckAssistBot — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/duckassistbot.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026duckassistbot, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {DuckAssistBot — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/duckassistbot}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/duckassistbot">DuckAssistBot — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)