Search engines · DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckBot

DuckDuckGo’s crawler. It supplements the Bing index that most DuckDuckGo results come from.

Operator: DuckDuckGo
Purpose: Search index. The crawlers behind Google, Bing and the other search engines. Blocking one drops you out of its results.
robots.txt token: DuckDuckBot
User agent: DuckDuckBot/1.1; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html)
Documentation: duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduckbot

Block DuckDuckBot

Add a group naming it to /robots.txt. Compliant crawlers stop before requesting any page. A firewall rule on the user agent is the only way to enforce it against crawlers that ignore robots.txt.

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Disallow: /

Allow DuckDuckBot when everything else is blocked

A group naming the bot wins over User-agent: *, so an explicit allow lets it in while your catch-all rules stay in place.

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Does DuckDuckBot reach your site?

The checker applies your robots.txt the way DuckDuckBot does, then requests your page with the user agent above, alongside 29 other bots.

Also run by DuckDuckGo: DuckAssistBot.

Other search engines: Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, PetalBot, YandexBot, Baiduspider.

Build a complete file with the robots.txt generator.