DuckDuckGo spent the better part of 2024 building Duck.ai, an anonymous chatbot that lets you chat privately with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. And now, just this past weekend, it launched a Chrome extension to help you pretend AI doesn’t exist.
And things seem to be working out.
The extension, called DuckDuckGo No-AI Search, sets your default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.com—DuckDuckGo's AI-free subdomain. You get the search index, same results, same interface, minus the AI-generated image results, the AI Assist summaries, and every other feature the company added in the past two years. A Firefox version launched the same day.
If you later want to toggle individual AI features on or off rather than block everything, DuckDuckGo's full-featured Privacy Essentials extension—which also blocks trackers—lets you do that.
The timing wasn't accidental. Google unveiled what it called "the biggest upgrade to its Search box in over 25 years" at I/O earlier in May—replacing traditional blue links with AI agents, expanding text boxes, and conversational 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 is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better,” Weinberg told Paul Therrot. “We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.”
Traffic to noai.duckduckgo.com tripled on May 28—a new record—and has been averaging 84% above its normal baseline ever since.
DuckDuckGo app installs in the U.S. jumped 18.1% week-over-week on average between May 20 and May 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 page have tripled…and they’re still rising,” the official Duckduckgo account tweeted.
AI Sickness
DuckDuckGo isn't the only company making money off the anti-AI crowd. Brave launched Brave Origin in April, a $59.99 one-time purchase that strips its 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 of that. The $60 fee compensates for that lost revenue. It's available on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS—and, in a fun twist, completely free on Linux, where the open-source community knows how to do it by themselves anyway.
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 redesign is expected to roll out later this year.
However, Mozilla isn't abandoning AI either—its free built-in VPN and summarization tools stay available for users who want them—but it's framing "off by default" as a competitive advantage.
DuckDuckGo's actual position on AI is more nuanced than the extension 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 unlocking Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, and—on the top tier—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 plenty of AI to opt out of.
What all three companies are selling, in different packaging, is the same thing: the right to use software that doesn't assume you want AI.
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