reCAPTCHA vs Turnstile: The CAPTCHA Shift, 2022–2026

Home › Guides › reCAPTCHA vs Turnstile

✓ data: HTTP Archive crawls from January 2022 to September 2026 (15,470,478 home pages in the latest), queried for our Anti-Bot Census; tier pages from Google and Cloudflare saved 8 October 2026 · method · caveats · download the data

Google’s reCAPTCHA is still on far more websites than any other CAPTCHA, but its share is shrinking while Cloudflare’s free Turnstile grows quickly. We counted both, plus hCaptcha, in every HTTP Archive crawl since 2022.

Read this first. HTTP Archive loads each site’s home page. Many sites put a CAPTCHA only on login or contact forms, so all figures here count home pages where a CAPTCHA script was detected, not every site that uses one.

reCAPTCHA, Sept 2026 13.64% of home pagesTurnstile 187,713 sitesreCAPTCHA-to-Turnstile ratio 2,258:1 → 11.2:1

Headline numbers

1. reCAPTCHA’s share of home pages fell from 16.38% in January 2023 to 13.64% in September 2026. Among home pages with any CAPTCHA we track, its share went from 99.2% to 89.4%.
2. Turnstile went from 1,163 home pages to 187,713 (1.21%). In January 2023 there were 2,258 reCAPTCHA sites for every Turnstile site; now there are 11.2.
3. Turnstile passed hCaptcha between July 2025 and January 2026. In September 2026 it was on 2.4 times as many home pages (187,713 vs 77,509).
4. Turnstile grew 63% in the last quarter alone, from 115,279 home pages in June to 187,713 in September. The share rose fastest among mid-ranked sites: in the Chrome UX Report’s 100,001–500,000 band it went from 1.04% to 4.03%. 83% of the gain came from sites not built on WordPress, Shopify, Wix or Squarespace. We couldn’t identify a single cause.
5. The platform matters. reCAPTCHA is on 24.05% of Squarespace home pages and 20.55% of WordPress ones. On Shopify, hCaptcha (3.51%) is more common than reCAPTCHA (1.81%). Turnstile is on 1.41% of WordPress home pages.
6. The pricing has diverged. Google lists reCAPTCHA’s free Essentials tier as “Free up to 10,000 assessments per calendar month”, then “10,001–100,000 assessments per month: $8.00 flat fee” and “More than 100,000 assessments per month: $1.00 per 1,000 assessments”. Cloudflare lists unlimited challenges on Turnstile’s free plan; the limit is that “Free users are limited to 20 widgets per account.”
7. 16,691 home pages load both reCAPTCHA and Turnstile, 8.9% of all Turnstile sites.

Every crawl since 2022

Crawl sizes changed over time (7.9 million home pages in January 2022, about 15–16 million since 2023), so compare shares rather than raw counts across the 2022 crawls.

By site popularity

Rank buckets are exclusive: “top 5,000” means ranks 1,001 to 5,000. Among the 1,000 most visited sites with a home page in the crawl, 17.64% load reCAPTCHA and 1.86% Turnstile.

By platform

Turnstile on sites that don’t use one of the four platforms rose from 0.64% to 1.29% between June and September; WordPress rose from 1.09% to 1.41%.

What the vendors offer

Cloudflare describes Turnstile this way: “Turnstile can be embedded into any website without sending traffic through Cloudflare and works without showing visitors a CAPTCHA.” It adds: “Turnstile can be used independently without requiring other Cloudflare services.” (plans page, last updated 14 August 2026). Google now documents reCAPTCHA’s tiers under the name Google Cloud Fraud Defense (tier comparison, last updated 6 October 2026). hCaptcha wasn’t part of this pricing comparison.

For every bot-defense vendor, not just CAPTCHAs, see our Anti-Bot Census. For how AI-oriented scraping tools are growing on the other side, see The Week Scraping Rebranded for AI.

Method

HTTP Archive httparchive.crawl.pages, mobile client, root (home) pages only, for 12 crawls from January 2022 to September 2026. A site counts as using a CAPTCHA when HTTP Archive’s Wappalyzer-based detection reports reCAPTCHA, Cloudflare Turnstile or hCaptcha on its home page. “Any CAPTCHA” also includes Friendly Captcha, GeeTest, Yandex SmartCaptcha, MTCaptcha, AWS WAF Captcha and others. Rank buckets come from the Chrome UX Report rank in the same table. Platforms are assigned in the order Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, then other. These are the same query results as our Anti-Bot Census (run 2 October 2026, about 3.4–3.6 GB billed per crawl). No new queries were billed for this page: a follow-up query to find what is behind Turnstile’s latest jump was estimated at 11.5 GB and stopped by our cost cap before it ran.

Verification. A separate script re-reads the saved query results, recomputes every number and checks every quotation against the saved vendor pages.

Caveats

• Home pages only, as noted above. A site that shows a CAPTCHA only at checkout or login won’t be counted.
• Detection depends on Wappalyzer rules. A rule change can move counts between crawls; we found nothing in the saved data that explains the June–September jump.
• Cloudflare’s own challenge pages, shown to visitors flagged by its bot management, aren’t counted as Turnstile here.
• The Chrome UX Report rank is a popularity bucket, not an exact rank.
• Vendor pricing is as published on 8 October 2026 and may change.

Download the data

• Trend (CSV): reCAPTCHA, Turnstile, hCaptcha and Friendly Captcha counts and shares for each crawl, 2022–2026.
• By rank and platform (CSV): June and September 2026.

Cite as: ProxyPicker, “reCAPTCHA vs Turnstile: The CAPTCHA Shift, 2022–2026”, 8 October 2026, https://proxypicker.com/captcha-market-share/. Data: HTTP Archive (Apache 2.0) and the Chrome UX Report by Google (CC BY 4.0).

Related: Anti-Bot Census · AI Crawler Census · The Week Scraping Rebranded for AI · Bright Data’s Patents by the Numbers.

Press & data requests: email [email protected] for interviews, the raw data behind this page, or corrections. See also our contact page.