I Tested DuckDuckGo’s Free AI Chat on Real Medicare Questions — Here’s What It Got Right and Wrong

By Rana — Editor, Elite Era Trends

Here is a small, practical question: can a free AI chatbot help you understand a Medicare letter — without making you create an account, hand over an email address, or agree to have your questions used to train the next model?

I tested it the only honest way: by actually using the tools. On November 14, 2026, I tried three free AI chats with the same three real Medicare questions. Microsoft Copilot demanded a sign-in before answering anything. Perplexity did the same — its free “incognito” mode answered my first question with the single sentence “Sign up and repeat your request.” DuckDuckGo’s AI chat, at duck.ai, answered all three questions with no sign-in at all.

That makes Duck.ai the pick. But “it answered” is not the same as “it answered well.” So I checked every claim it made against the real figures, and this article reports the score — including the one place its guidance could cost you real money if you followed it blindly.

Contents

• What Duck.ai is
• The test: three real Medicare questions
• What it got right
• Where it fell short
• Worked example: what vague price guidance costs you
• How to use it safely: five rules
• Duck.ai vs the alternatives
• The verdict
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources

What Duck.ai is

Duck.ai is DuckDuckGo’s AI chat. It launched in June 2024 as DuckDuckGo AI Chat and was renamed Duck.ai in March 2025. You open duck.ai in any browser, pick a model, and start typing. There is no account to create, no email to give, and nothing to install.

It is not DuckDuckGo’s own model. Your question goes to a model from another company — OpenAI, Anthropic, or Mistral, or an open model — but DuckDuckGo strips out your IP address and identifying details first, so the request arrives as though it came from DuckDuckGo. Its agreements say providers may not train on your chats and must delete prompts and replies after answering.

	Duck.ai (free)
Price	Free
Account needed	No
Default model	GPT-6 Luna (OpenAI)
Other free models	Switchable in the model menu, including Claude Haiku and Mistral Small
Web search	Yes — answers can cite sources
Privacy	IP stripped; no training on chats; chats saved on your device, not DuckDuckGo’s servers
Limits	A daily usage limit exists; DuckDuckGo does not publish what it is
Paid option	DuckDuckGo Plus, $9.99 a month, adds stronger models
What it cannot do	No memory of you across chats, no projects, no agent that acts for you

That last row matters. Duck.ai is a question-answerer, not an assistant that does things. It cannot file a form, call a plan, or remember your drugs from last week. For understanding a Medicare letter, that is enough. For anything that touches your money or your identity, it is a reason to keep it at arm’s length — see the five rules below.

The test: three real Medicare questions

I asked the default model, GPT-6 Luna, three questions a reader might genuinely ask about Medigap Plan G, and checked each answer against the verified figures. No personal information was entered at any point.

Question	What it said	Sources cited	Verdict
What does Medigap Plan G cover in 2027, and roughly what does it cost per month?	Correct coverage list: Part A deductible, Part B coinsurance, excess charges, 80% of foreign travel emergency; you still pay the Part B deductible; no drug, dental, or vision cover. On price: “a few hundred dollars a month,” varying by ZIP, age, and insurer.	medicare.gov	Mostly right — but the price guidance is vague and high
If I have Original Medicare and Plan G, what do I still pay out of pocket in 2027?	The main medical cost is the Part B deductible, estimated at $292, pending final confirmation. Plus premiums, Part D cost-sharing, non-covered services, and the 20% of foreign emergency care Plan G does not pay.	medicaresupp.org	Correct — though it never mentioned the $2,400 Part D cap
What is the 2027 Medicare Part B premium?	Projected at $209.50 a month, up from $202.90 in 2026 — “a projection, not the official rate.”	silvurinsurance.com, moaa.org	Correct — and this was the key test

No sign-in was requested at any point. The only interruption was a dismissible banner suggesting the DuckDuckGo browser.

What it got right

The coverage answer was genuinely good. It listed the full Plan G benefit set — Part A hospital coinsurance plus up to 365 extra days, the Part A deductible, Part B coinsurance, skilled nursing coinsurance, hospice coinsurance, the first three pints of blood, Part B excess charges, and 80% of eligible foreign travel emergency costs — and it stated plainly that the enrollee still pays the Part B deductible and that Plan G includes no drug, dental, or vision coverage. That is the complete list, and it matches Medicare.gov’s own Medigap comparison.

The second answer was careful in the right places. It identified the Part B deductible as the main remaining medical cost with standard Plan G, and it flagged the $292 figure as an estimate “pending final confirmation” rather than a fact. It also remembered the costs people forget: premiums, the Part D drug plan, services Medicare does not cover, and the 20% of foreign emergency care that Plan G leaves you paying.

But the best result was the third question, because it is a trap most AI tools walk straight into. The 2027 Part B premium has not been announced by CMS as of November 14, 2026 — I checked the CMS newsroom the same morning. The $209.50 figure is the 2026 Medicare Trustees Report’s projection, not a final number. Duck.ai said exactly that: “a projection, not the official rate.” An AI that states a projection as fact would have sent readers off with a wrong number in their heads. This one did not.

Where it fell short

The price guidance was vague, and too high. Asked what Plan G costs per month, it said to budget “a few hundred dollars a month,” while admitting actual premiums can be well below or above that. Compare that with the published benchmarks: KFF reported in October 2026 that the average Plan G premium among current policyholders was $194 a month in 2025, and 2026 data puts the median for a new 65-year-old applicant at about $150 a month. “A few hundred” is not wrong in the way a false fact is wrong — it is wrong in the way that makes you over-budget by a thousand dollars a year. The worked example below shows the damage.

Its sources were uneven. The first answer cited medicare.gov — the right source. The second cited only medicaresupp.org, a broker site. The third cited an insurer’s blog and a military officers’ association page, not CMS or Medicare.gov. The answers happened to be right, but the sourcing is not the standard you should accept for a money question. When an AI cites a broker instead of the agency that sets the number, treat the answer as a lead, not a verdict.

It omitted the drug cap. Asked what you still pay with Plan G, it never mentioned that Part D drug spending is capped at $2,400 in 2027. That was an omission rather than an error, and the question did not ask about drugs specifically — but the cap is the single most reassuring number in Medicare drug coverage, and a good answer would have included it.

Worked example: what vague price guidance costs you

Suppose you take “a few hundred dollars a month” at face value and budget $300 a month for Plan G. The real benchmarks say otherwise.

	“A few hundred” budget	KFF average ($194/month)	New 65-year-old median ($150/month)
Monthly premium	$300	$194	$150
Yearly premium	$3,600	$2,328	$1,800
Over-budget vs reality	—	$1,272 a year	$1,800 a year

That is not a rounding error. Budgeting $300 a month when the typical new applicant pays $150 means setting aside $1,800 a year you do not need — money that might push you toward a cheaper plan you do not actually need, or away from Medigap entirely. Premiums genuinely vary by state, age, and insurer, from roughly $110 a month in low-cost states to more than $480 in New York. But “it varies” is not a useful answer without a benchmark, and Duck.ai did not give one. The fix is simple: whenever an AI gives you a price range, ask it for the benchmark — “what is the national average?” — and then check that number against Medicare.gov or your state’s rate guide.

How to use it safely: five rules

1. Never paste personal information. No Medicare number, no Social Security number, no address, no date of birth, no policy number. Duck.ai strips your IP address and does not train on chats, but the words you type are still the words you type — and its own privacy policy warns that personal information in a prompt can appear in the answer. Type the question, not your life. Scammers already use AI voice cloning against this audience, as our family safe-word guide explains — do not make their job easier.

2. Verify every money figure on Medicare.gov. Premiums, deductibles, caps, and thresholds change yearly, and an AI can be confidently out of date. If it gives you a dollar figure, check it against Medicare.gov before you act on it.

3. Ask it to show its sources — and check them. Duck.ai’s web search cites its sources. Click them. A citation to medicare.gov is worth more than a citation to a broker’s blog, and an answer with no citation is worth nothing at all.

4. Watch for the projection trap. Any 2027 figure that CMS has not announced yet — the Part B premium and deductible, the IRMAA brackets — is a projection until CMS says otherwise. If the AI does not say “projected” or “not yet announced,” it has failed the test. Our 2027 Part B premium guide tracks what is final and what is not.

5. Use it to understand, not to decide. It is good at explaining what Plan G covers and what a letter means. It is not a substitute for comparing your actual plans in Medicare’s Plan Finder, or for a licensed counselor at your State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP), which is free. If the AI’s answer would change your coverage, confirm it with a human first.

Duck.ai vs the alternatives

	Duck.ai	ChatGPT (free)	Microsoft Copilot (free)	Perplexity (free)
Account needed	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Price	Free	Free	Free	Free
Privacy	IP stripped, no training on chats	Chats may be used for training unless opted out	Microsoft account data rules apply	Account-linked
Web search with sources	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tested Nov 14, 2026	Answered all 3 questions, no sign-in	Not tested this round	Sign-in demanded before any answer	Sign-in demanded before any answer
Best for	Quick, private questions	Deeper work, memory, files	Windows/Microsoft 365 users	Research with citations

ChatGPT remains the stronger tool for sustained work — it remembers context, handles files, and its usage now shares one allowance with Codex, as our ChatGPT and Codex guide explains. But every one of those strengths requires an account. For a retiree who wants to ask one Medicare question without creating another login, Duck.ai is the only one of the four that simply answers.

The verdict

Recommended, with one condition: treat its prices as a starting point, not a quote.

Duck.ai is the only free AI chat I tested this week that works with no account, no email, and no tracking of your questions for training — and it passed the hardest accuracy test I gave it, correctly refusing to present the projected $209.50 Part B premium as a final fact. Its coverage explanations were complete and correct, and it cited Medicare.gov when it mattered most.

Its weakness is specific and fixable: when it does not know a price, it guesses high and vague instead of giving you the published benchmark. So use it for understanding — what a plan covers, what a letter means, what you still owe — and verify every dollar against Medicare.gov before you spend it. Used that way, it is the most retiree-friendly AI tool I have tested: free, private, and honest about what it does not know. Just do not let “a few hundred dollars a month” become your budget.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• DuckDuckGo, Duck.ai — tested directly, November 14, 2026 (three Medicare questions, default model GPT-6 Luna, no sign-in)
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services newsroom — checked November 14, 2026: no 2027 Part A/B premium announcement
• 2026 Medicare Trustees Report (June 9, 2026) — 2027 Part B premium projected $209.50, deductible projected $292
• KFF, Medigap enrollment findings (October 2026) — average Plan G premium $194/month among current policyholders
• United Medicare Advisors, Plan G/Plan N cost data (2026) — median $150/month for a new 65-year-old Plan G applicant
• DuckDuckGo AI Chat guides (Beginners in AI, TechPilot, TechRadar, November 2026) — free models, privacy terms, Plus $9.99/month

Tested against primary sources on November 14, 2026. Microsoft Copilot (copilot.com) and Perplexity (perplexity.ai) both required sign-in before answering; neither question was submitted to them.