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Two separate trackers now count more bot traffic on the web than human traffic. Business owners keep reaching for a better CAPTCHA, but on the old puzzles that fight is lost: free, locally run AI models beat 92.6% of real reCAPTCHA sessions in a September 2026 paper. What still works is asking for something a bot cannot fake cheaply at scale: hardware, money, identity or history.
Small-site owners on Hacker News describe the same fight: a contact form full of junk, a signup form running up an SMS bill for numbers that never convert. The fixes that hold up are boring: a hidden field, a free widget, a rate limit keyed to the account instead of the IP. Here is the order I would add them in, and where the real money risk hides.
Every vendor in this space says "book a demo." A handful say the number out loud. We read every pricing page ourselves, on the same day, and found three groups: free tools that cover most small sites, a metered middle tier whose bill rises with a bot flood, and an enterprise tier whose published contracts start at $45,960 a year.
Indian Railways deactivated 3.02 crore suspicious IRCTC user IDs in 2025 and brought in Aadhaar checks for Tatkal booking, yet in the first half of 2026 bots still made up 57.74% of requests to its e-ticketing system. The US Embassy in India cancelled about 2,000 bot-booked visa appointments, and a month later visa agents said some agencies were using "automated tools and artificial intelligence." Here is what the notices, Parliament replies and GIGW 3.0's accessibility rule say, and what a portal cannot skip.
About fifteen questions, five minutes — Shyam writes it himself, free.
