What DuckDuckBot does
DuckDuckBot crawls the web for DuckDuckGo's search results and instant answers. DuckDuckGo publishes the IP addresses it crawls from for verification.
Should I allow DuckDuckBot to crawl my site?
DuckDuckGo's index also underpins DuckAssist eligibility. Allowing DuckDuckBot keeps you in both the traditional results and the AI answer layer built on them.
How to control DuckDuckBot
Target DuckDuckBot in your robots.txt with the DuckDuckBot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow DuckDuckBot
User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Allow: /Block DuckDuckBot
User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /DuckDuckBot FAQ
What is DuckDuckBot?
DuckDuckBot is DuckDuckGo's web crawler, used to improve its search results. It identifies itself with the user agent string "DuckDuckBot/1.1; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html)".
How do I block DuckDuckBot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: DuckDuckBot" followed by "Disallow: /" or specific paths; DuckDuckGo states the bot respects robots rules (WWW::RobotRules). To confirm that traffic claiming to be DuckDuckBot is genuine, compare the source IP against DuckDuckGo's published list of crawler IP addresses, also available in JSON form at duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.json.
About Search Engine Crawlers
Classic search indexers that now also feed AI features: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build on Googlebot's index, and Microsoft Copilot builds on Bingbot's.
Blocking these removes you from both traditional rankings and the AI answers built on top of those indexes, usually the most costly block of all.
