DuckDuckGo has launched chat sharing in Duck.ai, and the technical choices behind it are worth a look for anyone who still remembers ChatGPT conversations turning up in Google. Every Duck.ai share page tells search engines not to index it, both in the HTML and in the server’s response. The chat is also encrypted with a key DuckDuckGo says it never sees.
The announcement on DuckDuckGo’s Spread Privacy blog, reported by PiunikaWeb on 8 October, says the feature is live now at Duck.ai. On Tuesday we noticed that the Duck.ai terms had changed to make shared chats expire after 48 hours. Now we know what that wording was for.
How it works
- Share a reply or the whole chat. Use the share icon under a response, or Share > Create Share Link from the chat list.
- Recipients can continue the conversation. Anyone with the link can read it, carry on chatting or save a copy, without an account. Their follow-ups stay private to them, and yours stay private to you.
- AI-generated images come along, uploaded files don’t.
- Expiry by default. Links expire after 48 hours unless you choose otherwise, and the shared chat is then deleted from DuckDuckGo’s servers. The blog lists 1, 2, 7 and 30-day options. The terms we read on Tuesday listed only 1, 7 or 30 days, so the two pages differ slightly. You can also delete links early, and the Fire Button now clears them too.
- A key in the fragment. The chat is encrypted on the device before upload. The link holds an identifier and a decryption key, and the key sits after the
#, the part browsers normally don’t send to servers. DuckDuckGo says it tested this to make sure the key never ends up in its telemetry, error reports or logs.
The SEO part: noindex in two places
DuckDuckGo says it “studied” the share-link incidents at other AI companies before building this, and spells out its rules: share pages are blocked from indexing, there’s no opt-in to discoverability, links are long and random, and every link expires. On the indexing point, it says each shared chat page “tells search engines not to index it, both in the page and in the response our servers send”. In SEO terms, that’s a robots directive in the HTML plus one in the HTTP response.
That’s a direct answer to what happened with ChatGPT in 2025. TechCrunch reported that shared ChatGPT conversations were being indexed by Google and other engines, and OpenAI then pulled the “discoverable” option and worked to remove links that had already been indexed. DuckDuckGo’s post says shared chats from ChatGPT and Claude have both appeared in search results, sometimes with names and other personal details.
There’s also a second layer of protection, and this part is my reading rather than DuckDuckGo’s claim. Crawlers normally drop the fragment, so even a bot that ignored the noindex would be fetching a page whose chat it can’t decrypt. The noindex stops the URL being listed, and the encryption means there’s nothing readable to list anyway. That’s more robust than relying on a meta tag alone.
What it means for marketers
- AI share pages aren’t a visibility channel here. ChatGPT and Claude share URLs did turn up in search. Duck.ai’s won’t, by design. Don’t expect brand mentions inside shared Duck.ai chats to appear in any search-based monitoring.
- It’s a template for anyone hosting user-generated AI content. If your product lets people share AI outputs, DuckDuckGo’s defaults are worth copying: no index by default, a header-level directive as well as the tag, expiring links and no discoverability opt-in.
- The limits are honest. DuckDuckGo says plainly that once someone has read a chat, nothing stops them copying it elsewhere, so it advises short expiry times. If a screenshot of a shared chat ends up on a forum, that copy can still be indexed like any other page.
My take: this is a small feature from a company with a small share of search. But it’s one of the first AI sharing features designed from the outset around search indexing rather than patched afterwards, and you can see the lessons from the ChatGPT incident in it. With Duck.ai becoming more central to DuckDuckGo’s search experience, I’d expect it to be cited as the reference implementation the next time a share-link leak hits the headlines. More in AI News.