Should I optimise for DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo is a search engine oriented towards privacy, which does not track user information.
Because of this, SEO for DuckDuckGo works somewhat differently than it does for search engines like Google, which keep track of the behaviour of their users to utilise user engagement signals. This is part of their overall ranking mechanisms and quality assessments.
Despite working differently, DuckDuckGo SEO can be based on many of the same fundamental practices we use for Google, Bing, and Baidu.
DuckDuckGo market share
DuckDuckGo currently holds 0.66% of the global search engine market. By comparison, Google’s share is estimated to be 93.34%, while Bing holds 4.04%
Although the global market share percentage appears to be very small and potentially not worth exploring, in January 2024 it was estimated that DuckDuckGo had more than 46 million users worldwide. The company reports that three billion searches are completed on its browser each month.
Millions of privacy-conscious users do not want their IP address tracked or their search history saved for various reasons:
- They are professionals in privacy-regulated industries, such as law, healthcare, and finance, who require secure browsing.
- They are users who prefer fewer paid advertisements.
- They are users who are conscious of data privacy.
- They are users who are indifferent to personalisation in search results.
DuckDuckGo has enjoyed tremendous growth as privacy has become more of a concern. However, the search engine struggled to maintain momentum and ultimately declined past the highs of 2020.
This decline was caused by a combination of a change in user behaviour and competitive privacy features from more prominent competitors. DuckDuckGo’s inability to offer the same level of personalised experience also played a part in ending its growth. For example, in the last few years, the most significant industry player, Google, has rolled out several new privacy enhancements, to name a few:
- In 2020, Incognito Mode was extended beyond Chrome to include Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Search. This version of the mode allows searchers to use these platforms without their activity being tracked and saved.
- In 2020, Google enabled users to apply a setting that automatically deletes their search history after a specific period—three, 18, or 36 months. A year later, this was extended to location history settings.
- In 2021, Google also introduced The Privacy Dashboard. In this dashboard, users can see and manage the search history data being saved, and they can delete this data if they don’t wish for it to be stored.
- Also, in 2021, Google enhanced its security by rolling out Two-Factor Authentication.
Since 2021, Google has added several privacy feature additions related to personalised advertisements, cookie tracking, and app permissions.
How does the DuckDuckGo search algorithm work?
DuckDuckGo sources its search results from various places, including its web crawler, DuckDuckBot, Bing, and sites like Tripadvisor and Wikipedia.
The algorithm ranks pages based on relevance, authority, and backlinks, among other factors, without any insight into users’ past behaviour.
It was originally based on one core feature called “Instant Answers,” which, according to DuckDuckGO CEO Gabriel Weinberg, was created by DuckDuckGo and then replicated by Google. Instant Answers are Search Engine Result Page (SERP) results that display quick answers at the top of search results sourced from trusted databases.
In the above example, DuckDuckGo has sourced an Instant Answer from Apple Weather, which displays an answer above the search results.
It also features !bang commands for shortcut searches on specific sites, such as !yt for YouTube or !r for a direct link to Reddit.
It approximates user location via IP address for local results but without the precision of GPS-based tracking. Fundamentally, DuckDuckGo combines privacy with relevant, non-personalised search results, focusing on simplicity and efficiency.
DuckDuckGo SEO in five steps
We’ve prepared some key steps to optimise your website for DuckDuckGo.
Create quality content
Creating clear, helpful content that directly answers common questions helps you get featured in DuckDuckGo’s Instant Answers section above organic search results.
Through this SERP feature, well-optimised content from a relatively unknown site can appear above the blogs of major companies like Holland & Barrett.
Since DuckDuckGo does not personalise results, creating evergreen content that is universally relevant to a wider audience is best.
Have good backlinks
Build signals through linking from reputable and relevant sites. Like other search engines, DuckDuckGo values high-quality backlinks to boost rankings, and this is the only DuckDuckGo SEO ranking factor the search engine has openly shared.
If DuckDuckBot or Bingbot deems your site, since Bing is the go-to source for DuckDuckGo, to have reputable third-party backlinks, this will positively impact your site’s rankings on DuckDuckGo.
Our guide to website authority provides more in-depth information on website authority and ways to build link signals.
Add schema markup to your pages
Adding structured data to your site that tells the DuckDuckBot about various page elements and their meanings helps it understand your content better. These additional schema details also enhance your site’s visibility in SERPs.
To illustrate, a commonly used recipe schema in the above example contains the following properties:
- An aggregate rating count showing the average rating of the recipe displayed with stars.
- The recipe category.
- The recipe cuisine.
- Optimise for Bing.
As we have established, DuckDuckGo pulls search results from Bing, among other sources. Therefore, make sure to follow the best Bing SEO practices that are required for SEO, like optimising your content and fixing all technical issues.
As the second-largest search engine, SEO optimisation for Bing can only be a win-win situation. It offers a chance to widen your reach and capture traffic that others are missing out on if they are solely focused on Google search optimisation.
Improve local SEO
As DuckDuckGo uses IP addresses for locations, if your business has multiple offices or retail locations, make sure your Apple Business Connect profile is up to date.
You can equally create location-specific landing pages. For example, if your business has 10 retail stores, you can create dedicated landing pages targeting location-specific keywords.
Does DuckDuckGo have a search console?
While there isn’t a DuckDuckGo-specific search console as there is with Google, there’s still a way to monitor your site’s performance.
Since DuckDuckGo doesn’t share its analytics, you must utilise third-party tools such as Google Analytics 4 to determine how much traffic is coming in from its search engine.
To do this, navigate to Reports, Traffic Acquisition, click Source, and filter by Browser.
How to submit a site to DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo doesn’t allow for the same kind of site submission as Google. However, there are a couple of things you can do to help your chances of getting indexed:
- Make your site crawlable
- Index on Bing via Bing Webmaster Tools
- Submit the sitemap to Bing
- Work on creating a quality backlink profile
Even without direct submission, doing these things will increase the chances of your site showing up in DuckDuckGo’s search results.
DuckDuckGo AI features
DuckDuckGo is continuing to develop new features and functionality to accommodate the growth in user requirements and competition while maintaining its privacy culture. In 2024, AI and machine learning were also applied to the duck.ai chat.
The new AI chat is a free feature that allows users anonymous access to popular AI models such as GPT-4o mini, Minstrel, Claude 3, and Llama 3.3.
The DuckDuckGo AI Chat does not record conversations or use them to train the chat model. It removes all personal data, making it appear that the messages come from DuckDuckGo rather than an individual user.
DuckDuckGo has further data privacy limitations, as agreed with the AI models, to limit how they can use the data from the AI chat.
The downside of the DuckDuckGo AI Chat is that it has daily limits and no current upgrade options. However, DuckDuckGo might introduce this in the future.
