Today, we’re excited to introduce reCAPTCHA v3, our newest API that helps you detect abusive traffic on your website without user interaction. Instead of showing a CAPTCHA challenge, reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score so you can choose the most appropriate action for your website.

A Frictionless User Experience Over the last decade, reCAPTCHA has continuously evolved its technology. In reCAPTCHA v1, every user was asked to pass a challenge by reading distorted text and typing into a box. To improve both user experience and security, we introduced reCAPTCHA v2 and began to use many other signals to determine whether a request came from a human or bot. This enabled reCAPTCHA challenges to move from a dominant to a secondary role in detecting abuse, letting about half of users pass with a single click. Now with reCAPTCHA v3, we are fundamentally changing how sites can test for human vs. bot activities by returning a score to tell you how suspicious an interaction is and eliminating the need to interrupt users with challenges at all. reCAPTCHA v3 runs adaptive risk analysis in the background to alert you of suspicious traffic while letting your human users enjoy a frictionless experience on your site.
More Accurate Bot Detection with "Actions" In reCAPTCHA v3, we are introducing a new concept called “Action”—a tag that you can use to define the key steps of your user journey and enable reCAPTCHA to run its risk analysis in context. Since reCAPTCHA v3 doesn't interrupt users, we recommend adding reCAPTCHA v3 to multiple pages. In this way, the reCAPTCHA adaptive risk analysis engine can identify the pattern of attackers more accurately by looking at the activities across different pages on your website. In the reCAPTCHA admin console, you can get a full overview of reCAPTCHA score distribution and a breakdown for the stats of the top 10 actions on your site, to help you identify which exact pages are being targeted by bots and how suspicious the traffic was on those pages.

Fighting Bots Your Way Another big benefit that you’ll get from reCAPTCHA v3 is the flexibility to prevent spam and abuse in the way that best fits your website. Previously, the reCAPTCHA system mostly decided when and what CAPTCHAs to serve to users, leaving you with limited influence over your website’s user experience. Now, reCAPTCHA v3 will provide you with a score that tells you how suspicious an interaction is. There are three potential ways you can use the score. First, you can set a threshold that determines when a user is let through or when further verification needs to be done, for example, using two-factor authentication and phone verification. Second, you can combine the score with your own signals that reCAPTCHA can’t access—such as user profiles or transaction histories. Third, you can use the reCAPTCHA score as one of the signals to train your machine learning model to fight abuse. By providing you with these new ways to customize the actions that occur for different types of traffic, this new version lets you protect your site against bots and improve your user experience based on your website’s specific needs.
In short, reCAPTCHA v3 helps to protect your sites without user friction and gives you more power to decide what to do in risky situations. As always, we are working every day to stay ahead of attackers and keep the Internet easy and safe to use (except for bots).
Ready to get started with reCAPTCHA v3? Visit our developer site for more details. Posted by Wei Liu, Google Product Manager

Over 12 years ago, we started answering webmaster questions and listening to feedback on our webmaster forums (although at the time, it was a Google Group for questions about sitemaps - original announcement). From a small mailing list, these forums have evolved to cover 15 languages and over 50,000 threads per year. These days, we learn a lot from some of the cases surfaced on this platform, and constantly use it to gather feedback to pass on to our teams.

Google’s Top Contributors () and Rising Stars () are some of our most active and helpful members on these forums. With over 100 members globally just for the Webmaster Forums (1000 members if you count all product forums), this community of experts helps thousands of people every year by sharing their knowledge and helping others get the most out of Google products.

Some of the Webmaster forum participants

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re rebranding and relaunching the Top Contributor program as Google’s Product Experts program! Same community of experts, shiny new brand.

Over the following days, we’ll be updating our badges in the forums so you can recognize who our most passionate and dedicated Product Experts are:

   Silver Product Expert: Newer members who are developing their product knowledge

   Gold Product Expert: Trusted members who are knowledgeable and active contributors

   Platinum Product Expert: Seasoned members who contribute beyond providing help through mentoring, creating content, and more

   Product Expert Alumni: Past members who are no longer active, but were previously recognized for their helpfulness

More information about the new badges and names.



Those Product Experts are users who are passionate about Google products and enjoy helping other users. They also help us by giving feedback on the tools we all use, like the Search Console, by surfacing questions they think Google should answer better, etc… Obtaining feedback from our users is one of Google’s core values, and Product Experts often have a great understanding of what affects a lot of our users. For example, here is a blog post detailing how Product Expert feedback about the Search Console was used to build the new version of the tool.

Visit the new Product Experts program website to get information on how to become a Product Expert yourself, and come and join us on our Webmaster forums, we’d love to hear from you!

Written by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach team