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DuckDuckBot

DuckDuckBot is a web crawler for DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckBot’s job is to constantly improve search results and offer users the best and most secure search experience possible.
DuckDuckBot
Search Engine Crawler

What is DuckDuckBot?

DuckDuckBot is a search engine crawler. DuckDuckBot is a web crawler for DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckBot’s job is to constantly improve search results and offer users the best and most secure search experience possible.

DuckDuckBot powers a search engine, and search indexes increasingly feed AI answers and overviews alongside classic results. The pages it can crawl are the pages eligible to rank and to be pulled into AI-generated summaries, so allowing it protects both your SEO and your AI search visibility.

Like any automated client, DuckDuckBot consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

Want to see every AI bot hitting your site? Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic, so you can watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others crawl your pages and connect those visits to real citations and revenue. Learn more in AI crawler logs.

See every AI bot hitting your site

Promptwatch turns your server and CDN logs into a live view of AI crawler and agent traffic. Watch ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more crawl your pages in real time, see exactly what they take, and connect every crawl to the citations and revenue it drives.

How to handle DuckDuckBot

Most sites keep DuckDuckBot allowed, because blocking it can remove your pages from the AI answers and search results it powers. Only disallow it if you specifically want to opt out of that surface.

To control DuckDuckBot, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /

DuckDuckBot generally honors robots.txt directives.

Examples

  • After publishing a new comparison page, a marketer checks whether DuckDuckBot has fetched it so the content can appear in AI answers.
  • An SEO lead keeps DuckDuckBot allowed in robots.txt to preserve visibility in AI-powered search.

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Frequently asked questions about DuckDuckBot

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

DuckDuckBot is a search engine crawler; its operator is identified in its user-agent string and public documentation.

Be the brand AI recommends

Monitor your brand's visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Get actionable insights and create content that gets cited by AI search engines.

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