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

In short

Visits to noai.duckduckgo.com—DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search subdomain—tripled after Google introduced its AI search overhaul at I/O, and have been sitting 84% above baseline ever since.
Consequently, DuckDuckGo launched No-AI Search extensions for Chrome and Firefox on June 1, letting customers set the AI-free web page as their everlasting default with one click on.
U.S. app installs jumped hit file numbers.

DuckDuckGo spent the higher a part of 2024 constructing Duck.ai, an nameless chatbot that allows you to chat privately with fashions from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. And now, simply this previous weekend, it launched a Chrome extension that will help you fake AI doesn’t exist.

And issues appear to be figuring out.

The extension, known as DuckDuckGo No-AI Search, units your default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.com—DuckDuckGo’s AI-free subdomain. You get the search index, identical outcomes, identical interface, minus the AI-generated picture outcomes, the AI Help summaries, and each different function the corporate added previously two years. A Firefox model launched the identical day.

When you later need to toggle particular person AI options on or off reasonably than block the whole lot, DuckDuckGo’s full-featured Privateness Necessities extension—which additionally blocks trackers—allows you to do this.

The timing wasn’t unintended. Google unveiled what it known as “the most important improve to its Search field in over 25 years” at I/O earlier in Might—changing conventional blue hyperlinks with AI brokers, increasing textual content packing containers, and conversational summaries that reply questions earlier than you even end typing. Lots of people hated it. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg was, in fact, considered one of them.

“Google is force-feeding AI with no approach to decide out. Consequently, their outcomes are getting worse, not higher,” Weinberg instructed Paul Therrot. “We need to be the place that places customers in cost and permits them to determine how a lot or how little AI they need.”

Visitors to noai.duckduckgo.com tripled on Might 28—a brand new file—and has been averaging 84% above its regular baseline ever since.

DuckDuckGo app installs within the U.S. jumped 18.1% week-over-week on common between Might 20 and Might 25, with iOS installs peaking at 69.9% on a single day, per TechCrunch. “Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our “No AI” search web page have tripled…they usually’re nonetheless rising,” the official Duckduckgo account tweeted.

AI Illness

DuckDuckGo is not the one firm earning profits off the anti-AI crowd. Courageous launched Courageous Origin in April, a $59.99 one-time buy that strips its browser right down to the fundamentals: advert blocking, Courageous Shields, and nothing else. No Leo AI assistant, no crypto pockets, no Courageous Rewards, no VPN, no telemetry, no Courageous Information.

Folks appear to be completely happy to pay for a model of the browser that has had issues taken out of it.

Courageous CTO Brian Bondy acknowledged the plain pressure: The corporate generates income from Leo AI, Courageous Pockets, Courageous Speak, its VPN, and crypto partnerships. Origin removes all of that. The $60 price compensates for that misplaced income. It is accessible on Home windows, Mac, Android, and iOS—and, in a enjoyable twist, utterly free on Linux, the place the open-source group is aware of find out how to do it by themselves anyway.

Mozilla, in the meantime, is taking the subtler route. Venture Nova, Firefox’s first main redesign since 2021, will embrace a single Settings toggle that disables each present and future AI function directly. The redesign is predicted to roll out later this 12 months.

Nevertheless, Mozilla is not abandoning AI both—its free built-in VPN and summarization instruments keep accessible for customers who need them—however it’s framing “off by default” as a aggressive benefit.

DuckDuckGo’s precise place on AI is extra nuanced than the extension implies. The corporate nonetheless provides Duck.ai, a non-public chatbot with entry to GPT-4o mini, Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, and Mistral Small 3 24B without spending a dime inside each day limits, with premium plans unlocking Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, and—on the highest tier—Claude Opus.

It additionally constructed DuckAssist for AI-generated search summaries. The assertion on the extension’s Chrome itemizing—”AI ought to be non-compulsory”—is each a product philosophy and a direct acknowledgment that DuckDuckGo has loads of AI to decide out of.

What all three corporations are promoting, in several packaging, is similar factor: the proper to make use of software program that does not assume you need AI.