DuckDuckBot
DuckDuckGo's web crawler for the privacy-focused search engine.
What is DuckDuckBot?
DuckDuckBot is the web crawler for DuckDuckGo, the leading privacy-focused search engine. DuckDuckGo has grown significantly as users seek alternatives to ad-driven search engines, and DuckDuckBot is responsible for building DuckDuckGo's own search index.
The crawler is relatively lightweight compared to Googlebot or Bingbot, with lower crawl rates. It respects robots.txt directives and publishes its IP ranges. DuckDuckGo supplements DuckDuckBot's index with results from other sources, so being crawled directly provides a ranking advantage.
Privacy-conscious users who choose DuckDuckGo tend to be technically sophisticated and often make higher-intent searches. Allowing DuckDuckBot access ensures visibility to this valuable audience segment.
User-Agent Strings
These are the known user-agent patterns used by DuckDuckBot. Use them to identify this crawler in your server logs or configure robots.txt rules.
robots.txt example:
User-agent: DuckDuckBot Disallow: /private/ Allow: /
How to Manage DuckDuckBot
Allow DuckDuckBot to reach privacy-conscious search users.
DuckDuckBot has low crawl rates — unlikely to cause server issues.
Being directly indexed gives a ranking boost over third-party sourced results.
Use Switch to verify authentic DuckDuckBot requests from official IPs.
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