Agent Ready Crawlers

The field guide to every AI crawler and agent at the door, and the vendors who decide who gets in.

Live answer fetcher from DuckDuckGo

DuckAssistBot

In short

DuckAssistBot is DuckDuckGo's live answer fetcher. The token to write in robots.txt is DuckAssistBot. Check a visitor against the operator's published IP list. Verisoul reports it signs requests; DuckDuckGo's page names only the IP list. On robots.txt, disallowing DuckAssistBot takes effect after 72 hours; data is not used to train AI models; opting out does not affect organic rankings.

Operator
DuckDuckGo Vendor profile: DuckDuckGo
Purpose
Live answer fetch All live answer fetch rows. Fetches a page because a person asked an assistant about it, one request at a time.
User-agent string
DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)
robots.txt token
DuckAssistBot Matched case-insensitively (RFC 9309). The token and the user-agent string are different things.
Respects robots.txt

Yes, per operator

DuckDuckGo: disallowing DuckAssistBot takes effect after 72 hours; data is not used to train AI models; opting out does not affect organic rankings. Source, read 2026-11-04.

Verification

Published IP list (JSON)

Match the source address of a request against the operator's published list. Documentation, read 2026-11-04.

IP ranges
duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.json
Rate behaviour
Crawls pages in real time for AI-assisted answers.
Block rate

8.1% of 5,938 top-10,000 sites with a parsed robots.txt disallow DuckAssistBot at the root (483 sites). 4.3% name it; 3.8% refuse it only through a * group. Rank 25 of 31 tokens measured.

Across all 8,624 parsed robots.txt files in the crawl: 5.8% (3.0% named). Crawl of 2026-11-04; report.

Documentation
duckduckgo.com, read 2026-11-04.

Note. Verisoul reports it signs requests; DuckDuckGo's page names only the IP list.

Allow and refuse lines

To allow DuckAssistBot

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /

To refuse DuckAssistBot

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

Refusing or allowing in robots.txt states a preference. Enforcement of a refusal belongs in your WAF; see how to verify the identity above.

DuckDuckGo in the Verification Ledger

Two IP lists. All operators.

IP lists
Reverse DNS
publishes nothing
Key directory
publishes nothing
Cloudflare
not checked
Visa TAP registry
no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)
Mastercard Agent Pay
no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)

Other DuckDuckGo rows

Sources

Last reviewed 2026-11-04