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The open secret: the CAPTCHA wasn’t actually being checked against Google’s servers; any answer was accepted as correct – until yesterday, when someone armed with this knowledge launched an AI crawler. Now it’s being checked, so you’ll have to solve it.

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I'm not sure why this is downvoted. It approximately checks out. An "assessment" only counts if your server tries to verify it, so you could conceivably use recaptcha for "free" if you don't bother validating the results. It also explains why other people have started seeing "This site is exceeding reCAPTCHA Enterprise free quota" message.

It's not possible to downvote comments on this website lol

If you're not seeing a downvote button your account is probably in some hole :p

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