Private search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning further into the generative AI opportunity.

The non-tracking search engine has been dabbling with expanding the role of AI assistance in its product for the past year, including launching a chatbot-style interface last fall — available at Duck.ai. In a blog post Thursday, the company said the service is now exiting beta. It’s also now simply called Duck.ai, replacing the longer, mouthful name DuckDuckGo AI Chat.

Users of Duck.ai can dip into AI models developed by the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta via a chatbot-style interface that sees their search queries handled in a conversational style. In other words, they get AI-generated answers to search asks powered by cutting-edge AI models that DuckDuckGo is making available, instead of the conventional search engine list of hyperlinks.

DuckDuckGo notes that it has expanded the models users of Duck.ai can tap into — with recent additions including OpenAI’s o3-mini, Meta’s Llama 3.3, and Mistral’s Small 3.

While access to Duck.ai is currently free, there is a daily limit on queries — and DuckDuckGo says it is “exploring a paid plan for access to higher limits and more advanced (and costly) chat models.”

Simultaneously, the company is dialling up its use of GenAI in its conventional search engine interface — at duck.com or duckduckgo.com — by expanding the frequency that the search engine shows AI-assisted answers in response to a query. These are generative AI text summaries that can appear in response to search queries, above the usual blue links.

“We now serve millions of AI-assisted answers daily. If you opt to show them often in our traditional search results, they should appear over 20% of the time,” the company writes.

Despite deepening its embrace of GenAI, the search firm is being careful to ensure that users retain agency over how much AI babble ends up in their search results. Users are able to choose the frequency that AI-generated answers will appear — with “sometimes” being the default, and other options “often”, “on-demand”, and “never” letting users choose their own level of AI adventure.

DuckDuckGo is responding to wider market shifts, as GenAI has continued to upend digital business-as-usual generally and web search specifically. Search kingpin Google has scrambled to fast-follow the viral fallout from OpenAI’s AI chatbot, ChatGPT, and now embeds generative responses from its own AI models into search results. More recently, Google has even been experimenting with ditching links entirely in favor of AI summaries with a so-called AI Mode.

So what can DDG bring to this competitive frenzy? The company clearly feels its core privacy pledge can transfer into this area. It offers users the chance to tap into major GenAI tools with reduced privacy risks, since they do not need to sign up for an account with an AI giant to get access.

“Duck.ai allows you to use models from leading model providers without being tracked,” its privacy policy suggests.

“Chats are anonymized via proxying and never used for AI model training,” DuckDuckGo also writes in the blog post, which touts the free (and sign-up free) access to what it bills as “private, useful, and optional AI.”

So the pitch here kind of boils down to ‘have your GenAI cake and eat it in secret.’ Although, if you read the full Duck.ai privacy policy, DuckDuckGo is careful to point out that if your search queries include your own personal data, that could end up sitting on the servers of large language model makers. Albeit, it stipulates, it’s not tied back to your digital ID since it’s masking IPs etc.

Another feature DuckDuckGo is offering to make it easier to integrate GenAI into users’ search workflows is the ability to easily switch between its conventional search engine interface to AI chat and vice versa.

A chat button displayed below the search box of its search engine (see screengrab below) instantly transports the user to the AI chat interface — with the prompt-field there pre-filled with whatever they had just been searching for on DDG’s search engine, making it easy to hit the send button and get an AI-generated answer to the same query.

Reversing this flow just requires tapping on the same (now highlighted) chat button to flip back to its conventional web search interface. So this is a best of both worlds approach to tapping GenAI in search.

“We’re finding that some people prefer to start in chat mode and then jump into more traditional search results when needed, while others prefer the opposite,” DuckDuckGo writes, suggesting “some questions just lend themselves more naturally to one mode or the other, too.”

“So, we thought the best thing to do was offer both. We made it easy to move between them, and we included an off switch for those who’d like to avoid AI altogether,” it adds.

(Note: The chat button is also described as “optional” — indicating that users can delve into settings to turn this off too if they don’t even want a visual nudge towards GenAI.)

While DuckDuckGo started with just Wikipedia as the source for its AI-assisted answers, it has since expanded to include sources from across the web, providing what it dubs as “prominent source links” with more information on what’s underpinning the AI answers.

Another update is a “Recent Chats” feature that stores users’ conversations with the AI search interface “locally on your device — not on DuckDuckGo or other remote servers.”

Here, too, users can opt to disable the storage if they don’t want any record of their chats kept at all, even on their own device.

“Duck.ai chats are not used for any AI training, either by us or the underlying model providers,” DuckDuckGo also writes. “To respond with answers and ensure all systems are working, these providers may store chats temporarily, but we remove all the metadata so there’s no way for them to tie chats back to you personally.”

“On top of that, we have agreements in place with all providers to ensure that any saved chats are completely deleted within 30 days.”