DuckAssistBot
DuckDuckGo's fetcher for DuckAssist, the AI-generated answers shown above its search results.
DuckAssistBotOfficial documentation: duckduckgo.com
What DuckAssistBot does
DuckAssistBot fetches pages to generate sourced AI summaries in DuckDuckGo results. DuckDuckGo documents the user agent and honors robots.txt.
Why it visits your site
DuckAssist favors reference-style content it can summarize with a citation.
The bigger picture: AI search bots
AI search bots are the closest thing the AI era has to the old search bargain: they index your pages so an answer engine can cite and link them. When ChatGPT search or Perplexity answers with your page as a source, the crawl that preceded it is what made the citation possible. Referral volume from these engines is still small next to Google, but it is qualitatively different traffic - a reader who clicks through from a cited answer arrives having already been told your page is the authority on their question.
The strategic mistake to avoid is lumping these bots in with training crawlers under one blanket "block AI" rule. The major operators deliberately split their tokens so that training and search indexing can be controlled separately. A site that blocks everything AI-shaped removes itself from the one AI channel that links back - usually the opposite of what the blanket rule intended.
Should you block it?
DuckAssist answers cite their source, so being included is mild positive exposure. Volume is low. Most sites should leave it alone.
Block via robots.txt
Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask DuckAssistBot to stay away:
User-agent: DuckAssistBot Disallow: /
Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.
How to see DuckAssistBot traffic on your site
You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every DuckAssistBot request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because DuckAssistBot doesn't run scripts.
Viz's answer is the request log: filter to DuckAssistBot and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.