# DuckDuckBot > DuckDuckBot is DuckDuckGo's crawler for search indexing. DuckDuckGo's ordinary search crawler. DuckDuckGo is indexing your page. **Category:** AI crawlers **Also known as:** DuckDuckGo DuckDuckBot **Updated:** 2026-09-09 **Source:** https://truestat.io/glossary/duckduckgo-duckduckbot --- ## What DuckDuckBot is DuckDuckGo keeps the most current crawler address list of any operator here — it was eight days old when last checked, against nineteen months for the worst on this site. Its answer product cites sources rather than paraphrasing them. On this site DuckDuckBot is counted as indexing, which is the row it appears in on your dashboard. The category matters because it decides which number moves when this crawler visits, and the four are reported separately for exactly that reason. ## What its traffic looks like A steady crawl over time rather than a burst: robots.txt first, then pages in waves, revisiting the ones that change often. Volume tracks how large and how frequently updated your site is. A sudden increase usually follows a sitemap change or a burst of new pages, and a sudden stop is worth investigating — it often means a robots rule or a server error rather than a decision by the operator. ## How it is verified Checked as published ip ranges. The user agent has to carry the token, and then the address is compared against what DuckDuckGo publishes — refetched every six hours, so a newly announced range is picked up without a deploy. A request that matches neither is recorded as unverified rather than as a forgery: a published list can be incomplete, and an accusation needs evidence. Only a reverse DNS record resolving to somebody else produces a spoofed verdict, which is proof rather than the absence of it. ## If you block it You stop being findable through DuckDuckGo. Whether that matters depends entirely on where your readers are; check your own numbers before deciding, rather than blocking by reflex. Treat this as a search-engine decision rather than an AI one, because that is what it is. The question is whether the people you want are looking through this engine, and your own analytics answer it better than any general advice can. It is worth checking what you actually lose before writing the rule. Blocking an index crawler is one of the few changes here with an effect that compounds quietly: nothing breaks on the day, and traffic simply stops arriving over the following weeks. ## How it differs from DuckDuckGo's other crawlers DuckDuckGo sends 2 crawlers and gives each its own token, so they can be allowed and refused separately. The tokens differ by a few characters and what the fetch means does not: DuckAssistBot — ai assistant. Fetches a page DuckDuckGo is citing in an AI-assisted answer. Confusing two of these is the most common mistake with this operator, and it is expensive in one direction: a rule meant for the training crawler that lands on the search crawler removes you from results without stopping any training. ## Questions ### Is DuckDuckBot in my logs really DuckDuckGo? Not necessarily, and that is why it is worth checking. Any script can send DuckDuckBot as its user agent. DuckDuckGo publishes the addresses its crawler uses, so the claim can be tested against them — a request from outside those ranges is recorded as unverified rather than accepted. ### How do I tell DuckDuckBot apart from DuckDuckGo's other crawlers? By the token, and only by the token. DuckDuckGo also sends DuckAssistBot, and the strings differ by a few characters while the jobs differ completely — one may be answering somebody's question while another collects training material. Match on the exact token rather than on the operator's name appearing anywhere in the header, or the four end up counted as one. ### Does DuckDuckBot run JavaScript? No. It requests the HTML and leaves. That is why a browser-based analytics tag never records these visits: the tag is JavaScript, and nothing runs it. Seeing this crawler at all requires reading it server-side. ### Why is DuckDuckBot counted as Indexing and not something else? Because that is the job this particular crawler does. DuckDuckGo runs more than one — DuckAssistBot — and they are counted separately because the decisions about them are separate. Filing them together under one operator name would let ordinary indexing look like AI interest, which is the single most misleading thing an AI traffic report can do. ### Why does DuckDuckBot not show up in Google Analytics? Google Analytics runs in the browser. This crawler never opens a browser — it requests the HTML, reads it, and leaves, so the tracking script is never executed and no event is ever sent. Every browser-based analytics tool has the same blind spot, which is why crawler traffic has to be read from the server side to be seen at all. ### What happens if a DuckDuckBot visit cannot be verified? It is recorded as unverified, not as a forgery. A published address list can be incomplete or behind — an operator can start using a range before it appears in the file — so a miss is not evidence of anyone pretending. A visit is only marked as spoofed when the address's own reverse DNS record resolves to somebody else, which is proof rather than absence of proof. ## Related - https://truestat.io/glossary/duckduckgo-duckassistbot - https://truestat.io/glossary/fcrdns - https://truestat.io/glossary/spoofed-crawler --- From the TrueStat glossary — https://truestat.io/glossary. Privacy-first web analytics that also shows you which AI assistants are reading your site.