CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA is one of those little challenges a website throws up to check you are a human and not a script — clicking the traffic lights, retyping wavy letters, or just ticking an "I am not a robot" box. The name is an acronym: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Sites use them at points where automation causes trouble — login forms, signups, checkouts, and pages that get heavy automated traffic. The challenge is meant to be easy for a person and hard for a bot, so it filters out crude scripts, credential-stuffing attacks, and spam.
Modern CAPTCHAs like reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha often work invisibly, scoring your behavior in the background and only showing a puzzle when something looks off — like a burst of requests from one address in a short time. That means the surest way to avoid triggering one is to behave like a normal visitor rather than a flood of traffic. Volume, speed, and a suspicious-looking client are the usual triggers, which is why steady, human-paced requests from clean addresses tend to sail through without ever seeing a challenge.
How it relates to scraping
CAPTCHAs are usually triggered by behavior that looks automated — too many requests, too fast, from one IP. The reliable answer is not to "solve" them but to avoid setting them off: pace requests and spread them across many addresses so each one looks ordinary. 1Scrape's infrastructure is built to collect public data without tripping these challenges, so your runs come back as clean CSVs rather than stalling on a puzzle.
Frequently asked questions
Does 1Scrape make me solve CAPTCHAs?
No. You fill in a form and download a CSV — there are no puzzles for you to solve. Collection is handled by infrastructure designed to gather public data reliably, so CAPTCHAs are not something you ever touch.