DuckDuckGo has made two quiet but telling changes to its AI chat terms. The Duck.ai Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, now marked as last updated on 1 October 2026, raise the intended age for Duck.ai from 13 to 18. They also make shared chat links expire after 48 hours by default. The change was flagged by the policy tracker Is It Training On Me, whose diff was republished on 5 October. We checked the live page, and both changes are there.
What changed
- Age. The previous version (last updated 26 August) said Duck.ai was “only intended for and available to people who are age 13 or older”, with under-majority users needing parental permission. The new text says Duck.ai “is only intended for people who are age 18 or older. If you are under 18, you may use Duck.ai with your parent or legal guardian’s supervision.” Permission has become supervision, and the floor has moved five years.
- Shared chats. Shared chats used to be “automatically deleted after 30 days”. Now “links expire after 48 hours by default, or you can set the expiration date to 1, 7, or 30 days.” Links can still be revoked early, and they are still encrypted on the user’s device with the key embedded in the link, so DuckDuckGo says it can’t read them.
The core privacy promises are unchanged. Personal metadata such as IP addresses is stripped before prompts reach model providers (Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, together.ai and others). Providers are contractually barred from training on prompts and outputs and must delete them within 30 days, with limited exceptions. Sync & Backup chats are deleted after 18 months without access.
Why raise the age to 18?
DuckDuckGo hasn’t explained the change on the page. Our reading is that it is defensive. Duck.ai’s terms already say the service mirrors the usage policies of the model providers it relays. The pressure on AI chatbots over minors has been relentless, and an anonymised relay is a hard place to run age-appropriate safeguards because DuckDuckGo deliberately knows nothing about who is typing. Setting the intended audience at 18 and putting supervision on parents is the cheapest compliance posture available to a company that won’t profile its users.
It is still a striking line for a search company. DuckDuckGo’s pitch has always been “private search for everyone”. Its AI layer now carries an adult-by-default rule its search box does not. As Duck.ai gets woven more tightly into search (we covered its broader Duck.ai tools and World Cup instant answers last month), that gap between search and chat will be harder to explain.
The 48-hour links are the smarter change
Defaulting shared chats to two days is the right privacy call, and it matters for search too. In 2025 shared ChatGPT conversations turned up in Google results, and OpenAI withdrew its option to make them discoverable. Duck.ai links were never likely to repeat that, because the decryption key lives in the URL itself. But short-lived links by default mean fewer stale AI transcripts floating around forums, Slack channels and, eventually, crawlers.
For SEOs and publishers the takeaway is narrow but real. Duck.ai conversations aren’t becoming a public content corpus the way some AI chat logs have. If you see Duck.ai links cited as evidence in a community thread, expect them to stop working within two days unless the sharer chose otherwise.
Our take
None of this is dramatic, which is rather the point. DuckDuckGo is tidying up the legal edges of an AI product that has become central to its brand. The age change is a liability shield, and the link change is a genuine privacy improvement. Both suggest DuckDuckGo expects Duck.ai to get a lot more use. Alternative engines selling privacy now have to answer the same questions as the big chatbots about who uses the AI and what happens to the transcript afterwards.