People sick of AI have a new option for searching the web. DuckDuckGo recently rolled out an easy way to access an AI-free version of its search engine.
Google has been the dominant search engine for years. As of December 2025, Google held a 90.82% market share, according to Statcounter. Bing sits at 4.03% and DuckDuckGo holds only a 0.78% market share.
AI if you want it. No AI if you don’t. DuckDuckGo does both.Try our search experience with or without AI.https://t.co/nI7givKAB3https://t.co/EndvHRiSPW pic.twitter.com/BxtwzTONYuJanuary 23, 2026
DuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused search engine that relies largely on Bing for search results. Bing is arguably the most viable alternative to Google, as demonstrated by market share, but it also has AI.
Bing gets a lot of hate, but I actually think it's one of the better Microsoft products these days. At least for my searching habits, Bing yields similar or better results than Google in many cases. It's worse in some ways than Google, but overall Bing has proven more competitive than what memes and internet comments would have you believe.
But Bing is not immune to the ever-increasing push to build AI into everything. I'd argue that Bing's AI summaries are quite good, but they're not everyone's cup of tea.
If you'd like to use a search engine that relies heavily on Bing for search but that does not show AI, DuckDuckGo is here.
To be clear, DuckDuckGo is not just Bing within a wrapper. The search engine uses a variety of sources for specific content and DuckDuckGo has its own web crawler as well. There are also several privacy features in DuckDuckGo that make it unique.
That being said, DuckDuckGo does use Bing search heavily. The company explains how the search engine works on its website (emphasis added):
"Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience."
As far as I can tell, DuckDuckGo's No AI page results in a nearly identical experience to using DuckDuckGo after manually disabling Duck.ai, Search Assist, and hiding AI-generated images.
Of course, using the No AI page saves you the trouble of having to jump into settings. While it's a small difference, the No AI page lacks AI settings altogether, so it's at least slightly different than normal DuckDuckGo.
It will be interesting to see how people respond to an AI-free search engine in 2026. While it's easy to point to hate toward AI on social media and in headlines, many rely on it.
AI-generated summaries are especially popular since they gather together information from across the web and present content in a bite-sized piece.
There are concerns over accuracy when it comes to generated AI summaries and AI-curated results, but those can often be overcome by clicking links and checking sources. Of course, if you're willing to do that, you may just prefer clicking links and doing research yourself.
I've been looking for a new search engine anyway, so I plan to try DuckDuckGo's no AI page for a bit. I'll share my experience in a few weeks after I can get a fair comparison of DuckDuckGo, Google, and Bing.
Do you prefer AI in your search results? How often do you click the sources of AI-generated summaries? Let us know in the comments!
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