In short. Duck.ai offers chat with third-party AI models, documented web-search tools and privacy controls for provider requests, saved chats and approximate location.

Definition: As of October 2026, Duck.ai is DuckDuckGo’s chat service for conversations with third-party AI models, with requests anonymized by DuckDuckGo. Its documented features include web search and controls for chat history and approximate location.

Key facts

DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai help page describes a choice of chat models and a route from traditional search results to follow-up conversations.
The company’s product updates document access to web-search tools when starting a Duck.ai chat from the DuckDuckGo homepage, across desktop and mobile browsers.
Its privacy help says conversations are excluded from model training by DuckDuckGo and the underlying providers.
The chat-history documentation describes local storage by default and optional end-to-end encrypted Sync & Backup.
The provider-information help page says “Use Approximate Location” is optional and off by default.

What web-search capabilities are documented?

DuckDuckGo’s product updates, in the Q3 2026 section, describe starting a chat from its homepage with a choice of model, reasoning level and tools including web search. The same updates describe another way to supply website content: in the DuckDuckGo Windows browser, selected text can be sent through “Ask Duck.ai”, and open tabs can be attached by typing @ or using the attachment menu.

Search Assist is DuckDuckGo’s optional answer feature within search results. It scans web content to generate a brief answer and links directly to one or two sources. Its documentation describes expanding an answer with “More” and asking follow-up questions in Duck.ai. These are distinct interfaces: Search Assist presents an answer alongside search results, while Duck.ai provides the conversation.

The reviewed help pages and current product-update section do not specify a complete model-by-model web-search availability list or a fixed source-link count for Duck.ai answers.

How does Duck.ai handle prompts and provider access?

DuckDuckGo’s privacy help says it removes metadata containing personal information, including IP addresses, before sending requests to model providers. Requests therefore appear to come from DuckDuckGo. The documentation says providers agree to delete prompts and responses after generating a reply, subject to listed exceptions.

Those exceptions include OpenAI and Anthropic prompt caching in short-term memory for up to one hour. The help page also allows Anthropic retention where required by law or necessary to combat malicious use. DuckDuckGo stores and reviews a conversation if someone chooses to submit it with feedback.

Anonymization concerns request metadata. The Duck.ai terms explicitly warn that personal information entered in a prompt may appear in the output. The terms also advise verifying outputs against other sources before relying on them.

Which privacy controls are available?

The chat-history help page says chats are saved locally by default and history can be disabled in Duck.ai settings. Optional Sync & Backup stores chats on DuckDuckGo servers with end-to-end encryption. The master decryption key stays on the person’s devices, so DuckDuckGo cannot read the chats.

DuckDuckGo’s instructions for hiding Duck.ai give this search-settings path:

Settings > AI Features > Chat
Turn off Chat

That setting hides Duck.ai on search-result pages. The Search Assist help page separately lists frequency choices, including “never”.

FAQ

Can Duck.ai use my location?

You can enable “Use Approximate Location” in Duck.ai settings. DuckDuckGo’s provider-information documentation says it estimates a city using an IP-based lookup and removes the IP address before sending the city-level location to model providers.

How can I delete saved chats?

Use the Fire Button inside Duck.ai. The chat-history instructions explain that the browser’s Fire Button preserves Duck.ai chats by default, and pinned chats need to be unpinned or deleted individually.

Sources

Check how a page reads to answer engines. Open the GEO score analyzer