DuckDuckGo blocked the automated search request. Try configu

Error message

DuckDuckGo blocked the automated search request. Try configuring SearXNG, Brave, or Tavily as the web search provider.

What it means

Error "DuckDuckGo blocked the automated search request. Try configuring SearXNG, Brave, or Tavily as the web search provider." thrown in zeroclaw-labs/zeroclaw.

Source

Thrown at crates/zeroclaw-tools/src/web_search_tool.rs:204

    ) -> anyhow::Result<String> {
        let encoded_query = urlencoding::encode(query);
        let search_url = format!("{}?q={}", endpoint_url, encoded_query);

        let builder = reqwest::Client::builder()
            .timeout(Duration::from_secs(self.timeout_secs))
            .user_agent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36");
        let builder =
            zeroclaw_config::schema::apply_runtime_proxy_to_builder(builder, "tool.web_search");
        let client = builder.build()?;

        let response = client.get(&search_url).send().await?;
        let status = response.status();
        let final_url_is_block =
            contains_ascii_case_insensitive(response.url().as_str(), "/wr.do?");

        if !status.is_success() {
            if let Some(message) = duckduckgo_block_message(status, final_url_is_block, false) {
                anyhow::bail!(message);
            }
            return Err(http_search_failure("duckduckgo", status));
        }

        let html = response.text().await?;
        let html_contains_block = contains_ascii_case_insensitive(&html, "/wr.do?")
            || contains_ascii_case_insensitive(&html, "anomaly-modal");
        if let Some(message) =
            duckduckgo_block_message(status, final_url_is_block, html_contains_block)
        {
            anyhow::bail!(message);
        }
        self.parse_duckduckgo_results(&html, query)
    }

    fn parse_duckduckgo_results(&self, html: &str, query: &str) -> anyhow::Result<String> {
        // Extract result links: <a class="result__a" href="...">Title</a>
        let link_regex = Regex::new(

View on GitHub (pinned to 88bb9c8533)

Solutions

Configure SearXNG, Brave, or Tavily as the web search provider via `zeroclaw config set tools.web_search.provider <name>` and set its API key/URL.
Reduce request rate or retry later if DuckDuckGo rate-limited the request.

When it happens

Trigger: Thrown at crates/zeroclaw-tools/src/web_search_tool.rs:204 when the library encounters an invalid state.

Common situations: See trigger scenarios.

AI-assisted analysis of zeroclaw-labs/zeroclaw@88bb9c8533 (2026-08-23). Data as JSON: /api/errors/8638b177e089ef86. Report an issue: GitHub.