If you are a regular Internet user surfing the web you should know that sometimes your browsing is interrupted by a special test or quiz that requires solving before you can proceed with viewing the requested page.
Such a test is called Captcha, and it was placed on the site specifically to avoid the unwanted scraping or crawling bots from accessing the resource as well as to prevent any fraud activities on the site.
In this article we will take an in-depth view at how different Captchas work and the ways to override or avoid them in the first place. In some cases we will need to employ proxies that will help us in hiding behind various IPs without triggering the Captcha function on the targeted website. So, let’s go and dive into the best ways on how to avoid Recaptcha and Captcha on the web.
What is a CAPTCHA?
Before we get into describing the most proven ways on how to skip Captcha, let’s consider what it is and the technology behind it.
The word Captcha itself is an acronym coming from the words: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. And it was specifically developed for determining whether the Internet request on a website is coming from a human or a machine.
Captchas were introduced in response to private and commercial bots automating scraping, crawling and data harvesting on the web. Basically it serves for stopping any kind of request on the user’s side that are in conflict with the site’s official public API without employing some sophisticated biometrics verification.
Since the bots tend to send multiple requests over a limited time-frame to a website it can potentially lead to higher running costs or crashing the site.
Another valid comment is that Captchas are meant to prevent is the unfair advantage over regular users granted by such bots like in the case of buying limited-edition footwear (sneakers), tickets and other highly cherished items during limited time sales.
Also, website owners employ Captchas to avoid unsanctioned collection of information by scraping bots from the sites where they appear.
How Does Captcha Work?
We are all familiar with the two most common types of Captchas: image-based and text-based. The third type, audio-based, is less common but still can be seen online.
The principle behind all Captchas is essentially the same: you need to solve some content-related task that is not easily solvable by a machine.
In case of text-based Captcha you will be tasked with identifying short text messages. The principle here is rather elegant: one text is known to the machine and another should be “guessed” by the human users. If you enter the control word correctly, then the system upgrades the score of the unknown word. And with time it gets reused as a control word itself.
An image-based Captcha normally contains a set of images that all have one common parameter meeting a certain criteria. You need to select ‘all traffic lights’ or ‘boats’ in the images presented to you.
As for reCaptcha, it is a Google project that helps prevent malicious and bot-like activities on the search engine. It all started with the heavy use of text-based captures that helped digitize books and later evolved into a more sophisticated system that tracks the user’s behavioral patterns on the site. If some suspicious behavior is detected, reCaptcha feeds you a simple checkbox to prove that you are not a robot. This is a less intrusive, yet very effective way to fight off some automated bots for Google. If you are asking yourself: ‘Why do I keep getting Captcha on Google?’ and if you are interested in learning some tips on how to bypass reCaptcha, read on!
How to Bypass Captcha Verification
The chances of encountering captchas are very high when using a bot sending multiple requests to a target site. The best way to avoid captchas would be not to trigger them in the first place.
Before getting into specifics of how to prevent captchas, let’s consider what kind of captchas you will need to override by types.
“I’m not a robot” Captcha
When the word “captcha” is mentioned, normally people think of a single checkbox of “I’m not a robot” captcha that needs to be checked for them to proceed further with the site. However, there are more sophisticated ways for sites to determine that there is a human being behind the screen.
Image Captcha and Google’s Recaptcha
When it comes to solving an Image Captcha you are tasked with solving an image quiz. In most cases you will need to choose objects of one type from an array of various objects on a tile of images. One type of Image Captchas is Google’s Recaptcha. It makes you solve a quiz by writing a word from a pre-scanned image. It is one of the most frustrating captchas for the users and one of the most popular ways to bypass it is by using the Audio option that will discuss in detail below in the tips on how to solve captchas.
Math Captcha
Another popular type of captcha is Math Captcha. It is essentially a small mathematical problem that you need to solve to continue browsing. For instance, a site might feature before you a problem like: “4+2=” and it will not go further until you put in the correct answer
Honeypots
Now that you have some idea about Captchas and the mechanics behind them, it’s time to talk about how to bypass Captchas when you use scraping tools. Below we have taken some of the most common tricks, implemented by the anti-bot systems that prevent you from successful data harvesting.
Honeypots
Honeypots are much more sophisticated captchas targeting primarily bots. Normally it is presented as a hidden field (form or link) that will alarm the site once the bot stumbles upon it. You might need to consider checking the CSS attributes of fields to make sure your bot will not interact with a honeypot before you proceed with scraping the site. More on how to override honeypots you will learn below in the tip devoted to this kind of captcha.
Invisible captchas
There are also some captchas that work in the background of the site and are meant to track your browsing timing and behavioural patterns on thу page. Although it can be seen as a good alternative to other captchas out there, modern bots already take these captchas into account and try to mimic the normal browsing behaviour to the maximum.
Now that we have some idea about the types of captchas that we need to override, let’s get to the tips on how exactly we can do it, and consider the tools that will help us in this process.
Below we have listed a number of techniques to help you override triggering captchas.
1. Avoiding Captchas Using Proxies
Probably the best way to avoid triggering captcha is through using rotating proxies. Rotating proxies will make the process of identifying your real IP very difficult for the site by replacing it with various IPs for each request session. With rotating proxies you are also able to select whether to change your IP on each access request or during a certain interval.
Privateproxy is ready to provide you with residential rotating proxies and cheap datacenter proxies (yet, extremely reliable) to cope with avoiding captcha.
2. Rotating User Agents
You should also keep in mind that some websites consider a few bots to be useful for crawling inside the sites. Here we are talking mostly about search engine spiders. Your bot is not a search engine spider, so you need to consider hiding your real identity and replacing your user agent with the one of a popular browser or supported bot. And this is your answer to the question: Can bots bypass Captcha?
However, just replacing your user agent once will not work forever. The sites do not want you to know how to block captcha. You need to have a variety of user agent strings to rotate them while making the access requests. Also, make sure to check the headers of your browser to forward them in your bot.
3. Pacing Your Requests
A website can identify a bot by its behaviour on the site. Bots are faster and more predictive than humans. This may definitely lead to triggering captcha. So, we advise to choose random time periods in between of bot’s request to stay undetected.
Also, it is advisable to set delays between consecutive requests to avoid Captcha and causing harm to the site.
4. Avoiding Honeypots
Honeypots are invisible elements introduced to sites to differentiate people from bots. Once your bot starts interacting with such a honeyspot, it will be immediately spotted on the site and you will get banned.
To avoid hitting the honeypot, you need to study the CSS attributes of the site’s elements before interacting with them to make sure they are not turned off or hidden. Once you approve the element, you can proceed with your actions. Using honeypots is not such a common thing on sites, so you should not expect it everywhere. But it is a good thing to stay careful.
5. Avoiding Direct Links
Some sites use direct links to detect bots. it happens when a site has many direct referral links leading to it. In this case, the site will definitely use some sort of captcha defense against unwanted requests.
The solution here will be to use the referrer’s header to deceive the target website before you send your request to the direct link.
How to Bypass Google Captcha
When you are faced with solving Google search captcha (often referred to as Recaptcha), you might need to have in your arsenal some useful tips on how to solve Recaptcha faster. The following ideas should give you a number of ways of how to get around Recaptcha on Google.
But before that, let’s consider the main features of Recaptcha and the differences between a regular captcha and the Recaptcha.
Recaptcha is basically an advanced version of captcha. It was developed by Google and includes additional security features and improved user experience. The main purpose of Recaptcha is to protect websites from spam, abuse and automated bots by verifying the user as a human being. Recaptcha is all about using machine learning algorithms and advanced risk analysis to differentiate a real human user from a bot. This makes Recaptcha more effective than a traditional captcha.
Another key feature of Recaptcha is its adaptive security model. This model continuously monitors and analyzes user interactions to help determine the likelihood of a user being a bot. This adaptive approach allows Recaptcha to adjust its verification challenges based on the level of risk associated with each user, providing a more personalized and seamless experience for legitimate users, and all of that while maintaining high security standards.
Also, on the plus side, Recaptcha offers a more user-friendly experience compared to traditional captcha. Instead of pure distorted text or images, Recaptcha presents users with interactive challenges like identifying objects in pictures, solving puzzles, or clicking checkboxes to verify their identity. By using this approach Recaptcha significantly enhances user engagement and accessibility.
Yet another great aspect of Recaptcha is its integration with Google’s broader ecosystem of products and services. Websites that use Recaptcha benefit from Google’s infrastructure and expertise in machine learning, data analysis, and cybersecurity. This integration enables Recaptcha to usd Google’s resources to provide reliable and effective protection against spam and abuse.
Overall, Recaptcha represents a significant improvement in the field of online security and user verification over the traditional captcha. By combining cutting-edge technology of Google with a user-centric approach, Recaptcha offers a more sophisticated, secure, and user-friendly solution for protecting websites from malicious activities while ensuring a seamless experience for legitimate users.
6. Sign in as a Google User
Before you learn how to bypass Recaptcha, you have to remember that Recaptcha is a Google product, so if you sign in with your Google account (Google email) you will most likely avoid this quiz in the first place. Signing in with a Google account will give you some more advantages. You will be able to enable “do not track” requests to certain sites and delete your searches from “My Google activity” periodically.
7. Using Audio Captcha
If solving Recaptcha is unavoidable you can opt for an audio version instead of graphics. You can simply ignore the images that you need to decipher and go straight to the “Play” feature for hearing out the audio challenge.
The Audio Captcha is a good way of how to skip Recaptcha, since people tend to fail on solving images and with the audio you even have a download function for hearing out the Captcha properly before you enter its text.
8. Using the Recaptcha Bypass Bots
Now, how to get rid of reCaptcha if you are using bots?
If you are using Chrome or Firefox, you can choose bots for solving your Recaptchas. One bot called Buster is meant to help you solve the audio challenges. Once you encounter a Recaptcha image the extension gets activated and the bot will attempt to cope with the Captcha by itself. And although the accuracy is not 100%, it may sound like a good solution if you face ReCaptchas several times a day.
9. Using VPNs and Proxy Servers to Bypass Recaptcha
Both VPNs and proxies allow you to disguise your traffic behind another IP. They both can be rather effective when you need to avoid meeting Google’s Recaptcha. What you should keep in mind while choosing between proxy vs VPN is that opting for a public VPN or proxy can be rather risky. A free server or IP can be easily detected and blocked by Google. With VPNs, most of the paid services update their server locations to stay undetected by Google’s antispam features.
As for proxy services, we recommend you to buy reliable proxies from the pool provided by Privateproxy.me. You can choose from a wide selection of private proxies for search engines to bypass google Captcha. We also feature Google proxies for avoiding captchas on Google specifically.
10. Hiring a Captcha Solver
Finally, you can choose from one of many captcha decoding paid services that use human operators to solve the Captchas. One of such services is Anti-Captcha with an extensive record in fast Captcha solving business. The cost of using such a service will be around 50 cents for 1000 Recaptcha v2 puzzles.
In context of Google It’s also worth mentioning that the company has recently introduced Recaptcha v3, which does not interrupt your work on the site but uses sophisticated algorithms to determine if you are human. This means less of those annoying Captcha interruptions for bots as well.
Another great captcha solver with a vast API client support is CapSolver. The supported languages here include PHP, JavaScript, Golang, C#, Java and, of course, Python. The app guarantees a success rate of over 90% in resolving Captchas at the whopping speed of 10 million Captchas per minute. This will keep your scraper working continuously for as long as you need.
Consider PrivateProxy Your Trusted Partner
We at Privateproxy provide proxy-based solutions for all cases in the industry (including e-commerce proxies for helping you harvest info on Amazon and other shopping platforms). Powering your bot with a reliable proxy server to override Captcha is one of them. We at Privateproxy offer the complete line of elite proxies that will fit any use case related to scraping, which may be potentially inhibited by captachas or Recaptchas. You are able to order residential and datacenter IPs from us from a whole variety of pools and networks. We support all major locations worldwide and target websites on the city or ASN level. We also offer our own proprietary rotation mechanism for HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 proxies for even more efficient missions. You can contact our Customer Support on live chat to get a solution that fits your needs from the leaders of the industry.
Final Thoughts
While anti-spam measures on websites and search engines become more and more sophisticated to prevent automated scraping or parsing, there are ways to override these hurdles. We have considered the most common ways of how to beat Captcha above and are ready to help you with your missions through supplying the most reliable residential proxy service and datacenter IPs out there.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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How to bypass “I'm not a robot” Captcha?
The best way would be not to trigger the captcha in the first place by using VPN or Proxy. If you hit it, you can proceed with solving it using Audio methods. Also, you can engage ReCaptcha bypass bots or paid Captcha solving services to get around it. For detailed information on these and other ways to solve it, read the article above.
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How to block Recaptcha?
Unfortunately there are no ways to block Recaptcha completely. However, to reduce the number of cases you encounter it, you can engage in one of the ways described in the article above. So, start by using VPNs, proxies, sign in with Google account, or solve the Recaptcha with audio tool. Look for even more ways to reduce the effects from Captcha above.
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How to get around Captcha?
If you face it in a Google product, first sign in as a Google user. If that does not resolve the problem, try cleaning “My Google Activity” history. If the captchas still appear, consider using VPNs and proxies in your bots to change your IPs for each request. Other ways will include changing the headers and using Audio Challenge method for solving Captcha.
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