DuckAssistBot: robots token, verification and how to allow or disallow it

All 21 documented crawlers

Identity

documentation_url is null because duckduckgo.com did not serve robots.txt to this droplet on 2026-09-06 (empty response, curl exit before any status), so we could not reach the vendor help pages politely. Recorded as unreachable from our checker rather than routed around.

Allow or disallow it

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Allow: /

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

A robots.txt rule is a request that a well behaved crawler honours. It is not an access control, and this page does not tell anyone what to choose.

Build a robots.txt with DuckAssistBot and every other documented token

Questions

How do I allow DuckAssistBot in robots.txt?

Add this group to the robots.txt at the root of the host: User-agent: DuckAssistBot Allow: /. The token is matched case insensitively as a substring of the user agent by RFC 9309, and the longest matching rule wins.

How do I disallow DuckAssistBot in robots.txt?

Add this group to the robots.txt at the root of the host: User-agent: DuckAssistBot Disallow: /. A robots.txt rule is a request that a well behaved crawler honours; it is not an access control.

How do I verify a request really came from DuckAssistBot?

We have not found a documented verification method for DuckAssistBot: the vendor publishes neither an IP range file nor a reverse DNS convention that we could fetch. Without one, a user agent string is not evidence of origin.

What we measure

Of the 12976 seeded domains whose robots.txt we have read, 768 disallow DuckAssistBot for / and 12208 allow it, which is 5.9% disallowed, week 2026-W43. Counts only: no domain is named.

The weekly AI crawler access index

Sources

Free data

• The AEO Watch dataset
• Tranco top 1,000 AI crawler policy (CSV, CC BY 4.0)
• The AEO Watch API
• The checker as a command line tool (one file, no install)

Check a domain against every token

Check your own site

The same checks, run on your domain now: what robots.txt tells each AI crawler, whether the edge answers them, and whether the text is readable without JavaScript. Free, no signup.

Limits: 8 checks and 5 different domains per address per hour; a repeat of the same domain inside 7 days is answered from what we already hold.

AEO Watch is an independent, factual monitor. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or speaking for any crawler vendor. Every statement is an observation with the date it was made and the raw evidence behind it: a robots.txt line, an HTTP status code, a header. There are no scores, no grades and no verdicts here, and nothing on this page is advice. A site opts out at any time and the opt out is honoured automatically and permanently.