DuckDuckBot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by DuckDuckGo.
DuckDuckBot is the search engine crawler for the DuckDuckGo search engine.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
DuckDuckBot identifies itself with this user agent string:
DuckDuckBot/1.0; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
Share of DuckDuckBot requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| United States | 95% |
| Ireland | 3% |
| Microsoft Corporation AS8075 | 99% |
DuckDuckBot follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: DuckDuckBot Disallow: /
User-agent: DuckDuckBot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: DuckDuckBot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: DuckDuckBot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: DuckDuckBot group, DuckDuckBot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.DuckDuckBot from DuckDuckBot's user agent; check DuckDuckGo's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
DuckDuckBot brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake DuckDuckBot requests are a common cover for scrapers, so verify it by network rather than by name.
Transfon Security for publishersSearch crawlers fetch landing pages to check them. Keep DuckDuckBot allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersDuckDuckBot indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow DuckDuckBot on marketing and docs pages, and keep it off signed-in app pages it cannot use.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows DuckDuckBot by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
DuckDuckBot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckBot is the search engine crawler for the DuckDuckGo search engine.
Yes. DuckDuckBot follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the DuckDuckBot user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: DuckDuckBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "DuckDuckBot" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so DuckDuckBot may not follow it, and anyone can send DuckDuckBot's user agent, so a fake DuckDuckBot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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