In short. DuckDuckBot is DuckDuckGo's search crawler, identified by a published user-agent string and IP address list.

Definition: DuckDuckBot is DuckDuckGo's web crawler, an automated client that fetches web pages to support search results. As of 17 October 2026, DuckDuckGo publishes the crawler's request identification text, called a user-agent string, and its source IP addresses.

Key facts

DuckDuckGo's DuckDuckBot help page identifies the crawler as DuckDuckBot/1.1; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html).
The search sources documentation describes DuckDuckGo's own crawler alongside traditional links and images largely supplied by Bing.
DuckDuckGo provides a JSON address feed containing a prefixes array with ipv4Prefix entries.
DuckDuckGo's DuckAssistBot documentation assigns real-time crawling for AI-assisted answers to DuckAssistBot.

How does DuckDuckBot support search?

DuckDuckGo's explanation of its search sources places DuckDuckBot within a system that combines several sources. The company maintains its own crawler to support results. It also obtains much of its traditional link and image content from Bing.

For website owners, this means DuckDuckBot activity represents DuckDuckGo's own crawling contribution within that wider sourcing arrangement. DuckDuckGo's separate DuckAssistBot help page describes a crawler that retrieves pages in real time for AI-assisted answers. The documented purposes distinguish search crawling from that answer-specific retrieval.

How can a request be identified?

DuckDuckGo's published identification details give the following complete string:

DuckDuckBot/1.1; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html)

The version and the URL inside this string belong to the published identifier. The same help page lists the IP addresses from which DuckDuckBot originates and links to a machine-readable version.

The JSON feed lists addresses under ipv4Prefix fields. This extract preserves its field names and an actual entry:

{
  "prefixes": [
    {
      "ipv4Prefix": "104.43.54.127/32"
    }
  ]
}

Comparing the request's source address with that feed is a practical check alongside matching the user-agent text. The extract above represents part of the published list; the feed supplies the complete set.

How do robots.txt rules apply?

A robots.txt file communicates crawling rules. DuckDuckGo's crawler help page states that DuckDuckBot respects WWW::RobotRules.

The IETF's Robots Exclusion Protocol, RFC 9309 describes a crawler name in these rules as a product token. It places the file at /robots.txt in the service's top-level path. Applying the protocol's example syntax to the DuckDuckBot name gives this request to exclude site-wide crawling:

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /

This example targets the crawler name. The full versioned identification string shown above serves a different purpose in HTTP requests.

FAQ

Where can I find DuckDuckBot's published IP addresses?

You can use DuckDuckGo's DuckDuckBot JSON feed. Its prefixes array contains the published address entries under ipv4Prefix.

Does DuckDuckGo use its own crawler for every search result?

DuckDuckGo's search sources page describes its own crawler, while saying that traditional links and images largely come from Bing. Its search results combine these sources.

Sources

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