DuckDuckGo
DuckAssistBot
Fetches a page DuckDuckGo is citing in an AI-assisted answer.
When you see it: DuckDuckGo used your page as a source in an assisted answer.
How we check it is really DuckDuckGo
- 01
The user agent has to contain DuckAssistBot.
- 02
The address is compared against DuckDuckGo's published ranges, which we refetch every six hours.
DuckDuckGo publishes no reverse DNS record, so an address outside the list is recorded as unverified rather than as a forgery — the list may simply be behind.
What each result means
- verified
- The address matched DuckDuckGo's own published records. This really was them.
- unverified
- We could not confirm it, and that is all it means. The operator may publish nothing to check against, a published list may be behind the addresses actually in use, or DNS may simply have been slow. It is not an accusation.
- spoofed
- The address belongs to somebody else — its own reverse DNS record resolves to a different owner. That is positive evidence of a forgery rather than a failure to find evidence, which is why it is reported as its own result and never folded into the row above.
The distinction costs nothing to make and is the reason these numbers can be shown to someone who will ask where they came from. A report that cannot separate “we do not know” from “this was faked” invites exactly one question it cannot answer.
The lists this is checked against
Published by DuckDuckGo and refetched every six hours. Open them; they are the same files we read.
- Operator
- DuckDuckGo
- Token
- DuckAssistBot
- Counted as
- AI assistant
- Verification
- Published IP ranges
- Runs JavaScript
- No
- Operator docs
- Published
User agent
DuckAssistBotMatched as a token, not as a full browser string. DuckDuckGo adds and changes the version and product text around it without notice, so a filter pinned to the whole header stops working the first time they bump a version while one matching DuckAssistBot keeps working. The same string is what DuckDuckGo names in robots.txt.
One real request
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DuckAssistBot/1.0; +https://duckduckgo.com/duckassistbot.html)DuckDuckGo's other crawlers
DuckDuckGo sends 2 crawlers, each with its own token and its own job. They are counted separately for that reason — the tokens differ by a few characters and what the fetch means does not, so folding them into one operator row would let indexing look like AI interest.
| Token | Counted as | Verification | What it fetches for |
|---|---|---|---|
DuckAssistBotthis page | AI answers | Published IP ranges | Fetches a page DuckDuckGo is citing in an AI-assisted answer. |
| DuckDuckBot | Indexing | Published IP ranges | DuckDuckGo's ordinary search crawler. |
Your analytics never mentioned DuckAssistBot because it cannot see it.
This crawler takes your HTML and leaves without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads it server-side, checks the address, and shows you which pages it fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.