Google introduces reCaptcha version that requires no user interaction

Google has released version 3 of reCaptcha to developers. The new method of unmasking bots no longer requires conscious user interaction and provides a score for the site administrator.

With the reCaptcha v3 API, Google is introducing the Action tag, which allows site administrators to understand which pages bots are targeting and how suspicious traffic was to those pages. The Recaptcha engine takes care of the risk analysis. This happens in the background, where the engine can distinguish online behavior of a human user from that of a bot.

Site administrators receive a score from reCaptcha v3 that indicates how suspicious user interactions are. The administrators can indicate themselves where the limit is for blocking a user and whether further verification is required. In addition, they can combine the score with their own methods to identify users, such as profiles and transaction history, Google writes. Finally, the score can also be used in combination with machine learning, to set up models that can be used to prevent abuse.

Captcha stands for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. With reCaptcha v1, users still had to recognize and fill in a distorted text and with v2 clicking on a box with ‘I am not a robot’ was enough, because the engine already took into account several signals of behavior.