In light of some of the downsides of reCAPTCHA v2, Google developed reCAPTCHA v3 in order to provide a better user experience and catch the more sophisticated bots. reCAPTCHA v3 is more transparent for website visitors. In fact it works in the background. Google hasn’t told us much about how it works. But, there are no tricky challenges or puzzles to solve. Instead, reCAPTCHA v3 simply monitors the user’s behavior continuously to decide if it is a real live human or a bot.
For each request the visitor makes on the website, reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score between 0 and 1. The score depends on how likely it is that the request came from a bot or a human. A score close to 0 means that you are probably a bot, and closer to 1 means that you are probably a human.
The website admins can define certains actions to help increase the accuracy of the scoring system and to help reCAPTCHA understand what is and isn’t normal user behavior, depending on the context.
But, there is a catch! Though reCAPTCHA v3 is a better user experience for website visitors, who don’t have their browsing time delayed by a set of challenges, it does present new issues for website admins.
reCAPTCHA v2 was simply for website admins, because the only required action was to determine whether the user completed the challenge accurately or not. However, with reCAPTCHA v3, now the website administrator needs to determine which action to take based on the numerical score. It is a much more difficult task, even for experienced webmasters.