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.

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   Product Expert Alumni: Past members who are no longer active, but were previously recognized for their helpfulness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