DuckAssistBot

What user agent does DuckAssistBot use?

DuckDuckGo publishes this user agent string for DuckAssistBot.

DuckAssistBot/1.2; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)

How do I block DuckAssistBot?

DuckDuckGo says DuckAssistBot stops crawling a site 72 hours after its robots.txt disallows it, and that opting out does not change whether or where the site appears in DuckDuckGo search.

Add this to the robots.txt file at the root of your site:

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

How do I check that a DuckAssistBot visit is real?

Anyone can put a crawler’s name in a user agent, so the name alone proves nothing.

DuckDuckGo lists the IP addresses DuckAssistBot crawls from, on its help page and as JSON.

Spreelytics runs this check for you. Every crawl that claims to be DuckAssistBot is compared with the IP ranges DuckDuckGo publishes, refreshed every 12 hours, and one from outside them counts as spoofed.

How do I see DuckAssistBot visits on my site?

Your server’s access logs record the user agent of each request, so you can search them for “DuckAssistBot”.

Or add the Spreelytics server middleware, @spreelytics/ai-crawl. It recognises DuckAssistBot by its user agent and counts each visit on the Bots page under AI answers, as DuckDuckGo, apart from your visitor numbers.

Sources: duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckassistbot