CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a test verifying that the user is human. Main types in 2026:
- reCAPTCHA v2/v3 (Google) — most popular. v2 is "I'm not a robot" checkbox or image grid. v3 is invisible, outputs score 0.0-1.0.
- hCaptcha — privacy-focused alternative to reCAPTCHA. Image challenges.
- Cloudflare Turnstile — Cloudflare invisible captcha, growing fast.
- FunCaptcha (Arkose Labs) — interactive 3D challenges, hardest to solve.
Bypass strategies:
- Solving services — 2Captcha, Anti-Captcha. Price $1-3 / 1000 captchas. Works for most types but slow (10-30s).
- Session warming — for reCAPTCHA v3, build trust score through normal browsing, the captcha may not appear at all.
- AI solvers — computer vision models for some types. Variable accuracy.
- Premium residential proxies — clean IP reputation often reduces captcha frequency.
In production scraping: captcha is not a blocker but a cost — budget $0.001-0.003 per request when it appears. Anti-bot detection and CAPTCHA are often correlated.