DuckDuckGo has big plans for embedding AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company just announced that its AI-generated answers, which appear for certain queries on its search engine, have exited beta and now source information from across the web — not just Wikipedia. It will soon integrate web search within its AI chatbot, which has also exited beta.
DuckDuckGo first launched AI-assisted answers — originally called DuckAssist — in 2023. The feature is billed as a less obnoxious version of tools like Google’s AI Overviews, designed to offer more concise responses and let you adjust how often you see them, including turning the responses off entirely. If you have DuckDuckGo’s AI-generated answers set to “often,” you’ll still only see them around 20 percent of the time, though the company plans on increasing the frequency eventually.
“We’d like to raise that over time,” Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo, told The Verge. “That’s another major area that we’re working on … We want to kind of stay conservative with it. We don’t want to put it in front of people if we don’t think it’s right.”
Some of DuckDuckGo’s AI-assisted answers bring up a box for follow-up questions, redirecting you to a conversation with its Duck.ai chatbot. As is the case with its AI-assisted answers, you don’t need an account to use Duck.ai, and it comes with the same emphasis on privacy. It lets you toggle between GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku, with the advantage being that you can interact with each model anonymously by hiding your IP address. DuckDuckGo also has agreements with the AI company behind each model to ensure your data isn’t used for training.
Duck.ai also rolled out a feature called Recent Chats, which stores your previous conversations locally on your device rather than on DuckDuckGo’s servers. Though Duck.ai is also leaving beta, that doesn’t mean the flow of new features will stop.
In the next few weeks, Duck.ai will add support for web search, which should enhance its ability to respond to questions. The company is also working on adding voice interaction on iPhone and Android, along with the ability to upload images and ask questions about them. Weinberg said that while Duck.ai will always remain free, the company is considering including access to more advanced AI models with its $9.99 per month subscription.
DuckDuckGo isn’t going to join OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and maybe even Meta in creating a separate app for its AI chatbot, however. “We think the end state is that really the ultimate app mixes all these things,” Weinberg said. “We think some queries are better to start with chat, some are better to start with search. A lot of them, you could start with either. Then sometimes you want to flow between. And if you’re flowing between, kind of fluidly like that, it’s a better experience to have it in one app.”
You can try out DuckDuckGo’s chatbot on the Duck.ai website or the DuckDuckGo browser, as well as find AI-assisted answers in the DuckDuckGo search engine.
