DuckAssistBot is a web crawler that scans websites to collect content for DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers feature, which generates brief responses to search queries using natural language technology and Wikipedia sources.

At a glance

Operator: DuckDuckGo
Type: AI Assistant
RSL category: ai-input

How Centinel checks it

User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.
Web bot auth: The crawler signs its requests, and Centinel checks the signature against the operator key.

A request that passes one of these checks is DuckAssistbot itself. One that only matches the user agent is reported as unverified. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.

Allowing or blocking it

The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, AI Assistant.

Back to the crawler catalog