DuckDuckGo Launched Duck AI. Now Their Hit Product is ‘No AI’

DuckDuckGo spent most of 2024 building it Duck.aian anonymous chatbot that allows you to chat privately with models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. And now, last weekend, it launched a Chrome extension to help you pretend AI doesn’t exist.

And things seem to be working out.

The phone, called DuckDuckGo No-AI Searchsets your default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.com: the AI-free subdomain of DuckDuckGo. You get the search index, the same results, the same interface, minus the AI-generated image results, the AI ​​Assist summaries, and all the other features the company has added in the last two years. A Firefox version was launched the same day.

Later, if you want to enable or disable individual AI features instead of blocking everything, you can use DuckDuckGo’s full functionality. Privacy Essentials extension-which also blocks trackers – lets you do that.

The timing was not coincidental. Google revealed what it called “the biggest upgrade to the search box in over 25 years” at I/O earlier in May – replacing traditional blue links with AI agents, expanding text boxes, and providing conversation summaries that answer questions before you even finish typing. A lot of people hated it. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg was, of course, one of them.

“Google enforces AI without any way to opt out. As a result, their results get worse, not better,” Weinberg told us. Paul Therot. “We want to be the place where users are in charge and let them decide how much or how little AI they want.”

Traffic to noai.duckduckgo.com tripled on May 28– a new record – and has since averaged 84% above the normal baseline.

DuckDuckGo app installs in the US increased an average of 18.1% week-over-week between May 20 and May 25, with iOS installs peaking at 69.9% in a single day. TechCrunch. “Since Google announced its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our ‘No AI’ search page have tripled… and they’re still rising,” the official Duckduckgo account said tweeted.

AI Disease

DuckDuckGo isn’t the only company making money from the anti-AI crowd. Bravely launched Brave origin in April, a one-time purchase of $59.99 that strips the browser down to the basics: ad blocking, Brave Shields and nothing else. No Leo AI assistant, no crypto wallet, no Brave Rewards, no VPN, no telemetry, no Brave News.

People seem to be happy to pay for a version of the browser that has had things taken out of it.

Brave CTO Brian Bondy acknowledged the obvious tension: the company generates revenue from Leo AI, Brave Wallet, Brave Talk, its VPN and crypto partnerships. Origin removes all that. The $60 fee will offset that lost income. It’s available on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS, and, in a nice twist, completely free on Linux, where the open source community still manages to do it themselves.

Mozilla, meanwhile, is taking the subtler route. Project Nova, Firefox’s first major redesign since 2021, will include a single settings toggle that disables every current and future AI feature at once. The new design is expected to be rolled out later this year.

However, Mozilla isn’t giving up on AI either – its free built-in VPN and summary tools remain available for users who want them – but it sees ‘disabled by default’ as a competitive advantage.

DuckDuckGo’s actual position on AI is more nuanced than the expansion implies. The company still offers Duck.ai, a private chatbot with access to GPT-4o mini, Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout and Mistral Small 3 24B, for free within daily limits, with premium plans that unlock Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2 and – at the highest level – Claude Opus.

It also built DuckAssist for AI-generated search summaries. The statement on the extension’s Chrome listing – “AI should be optional” – is both a product philosophy and a direct acknowledgment that DuckDuckGo has enough AI to opt out of.

What all three companies are selling in different packages is the same: the right to use software that doesn’t assume you want AI.