DuckDuckGo AI Chat (Duck.ai) and Search Assist

Duck.ai is the AI chat service of DuckDuckGo. It lets people chat with third-party AI models, and DuckDuckGo removes the user’s IP address before it sends the prompt on. The Duck.ai help pages describe no web crawler for Duck.ai. The DuckDuckGo AI feature that reads web pages is Search Assist, which writes short answers in search results.

What Duck.ai is

The Duck.ai help page describes private conversations with third-party AI chat models, anonymized by DuckDuckGo. The free models come from Anthropic, Mistral AI and OpenAI, plus open models that Tinfoil.sh hosts. Subscribers get more models. The models change often, so see the current model list.

The Duck.ai privacy policy says these things:

• DuckDuckGo removes metadata with personal information, such as the IP address, before it sends prompts to the model providers.
• The agreements with model providers forbid the use of prompts and outputs to develop or improve their models.
• Providers must delete the data when they no longer need it to give outputs. The limit is 30 days, with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance.

Recent chats are stored on the user’s device, not on DuckDuckGo servers. Users can turn off Duck.ai and Search Assist in DuckDuckGo search settings and in the DuckDuckGo browser, as the opt-out page shows.

Duck.ai and the web

DuckDuckGo says that it has two AI features: Duck.ai and Search Assist. It says that Search Assist answers are sourced from the web. The Duck.ai help pages and privacy policy describe no web search feature and no user agent for Duck.ai.

Search Assist

Search Assist is an optional answer box in DuckDuckGo search results. DuckDuckGo scans the web for relevant content and writes a short answer. Each answer links to one or two sources.

Users choose how often Search Assist appears: often, sometimes (the default), on demand, or never. For follow-up questions, Search Assist sends users to Duck.ai.

Which bots to allow or block

DuckDuckGo says that it runs its own crawler and many indexes, and that it gets most traditional links and images from Bing. Three crawlers matter for a site owner:

• DuckAssistBot fetches pages for Search Assist answers. Block it to keep your pages out of these answers.
• DuckDuckBot crawls for DuckDuckGo search results.
• Bingbot crawls for Bing, the source of most traditional DuckDuckGo links.

A site that wants to appear in DuckDuckGo search needs DuckDuckBot and Bingbot to have access.