Crawls pages in real time for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers, which cite their sources. DuckDuckGo says the data is not used to train AI models.
Source: duckduckgo.comOperator
DuckDuckGo
Job
User-triggered fetch
Visits a page because a person asked a question that needs it. This is the visit that can end in a citation.
robots.txt
Follows robots.txt
DuckDuckGo says that once robots.txt disallows DuckAssistBot, it stops crawling your site after 72 hours.
Source: duckduckgo.comDuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of your domain.
A crawler obeys only the most specific group that names it (RFC 9309), so a named group does not inherit the rules under User-agent: *. Repeat any paths you keep private, as the example does with /admin/.
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Allow: / Disallow: /admin/
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Disallow: /
Read from the robots.txt we serve. We want AI engines to read and cite this site, so every AI crawler is allowed everywhere except the app, the API and the sign-in pages (/dashboard/, /api/, /login, /signup, /sign-in, /sign-up). The file also declares Content-Signal: ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes.
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Allow: / Disallow: /dashboard/ Disallow: /api/ Disallow: /login Disallow: /signup Disallow: /sign-in Disallow: /sign-up
See the whole file. The same rules repeat in every group, because a crawler that matches a named group ignores the wildcard one.
DuckDuckGo says opting out does not affect organic rankings or whether your site appears in its search results.
Sources, checked 2026-09-24