Bots sometimes fill in forms on online stores, and the email step of a quiz is one of them. Every fake sign-up can end up in your email tool, where it takes up a contact on your plan and can hurt how well your emails get delivered.
Lantern's bot check uses Google reCAPTCHA to tell people and bots apart before the email is saved. Your customers never have to solve a puzzle or tick an "I'm not a robot" box.
Which email steps it covers
The bot check covers both places where a quiz can collect an email:
The Optin Page, the quiz page where customers leave their email or phone number, usually right before their results. See Add and customize an e-mail capture page.
The email sign-up on the Results page, where customers can leave their email after they've seen their recommendations. See Email sign-up on the Results page.
It's one setting for both: turning it on in one place turns it on in the other.
Turn on the bot check
Open your quiz in the Lantern quiz editor.
Click Optin Page in the left sidebar.
In the settings on the right, open Show/Hide Page Elements.
Tick Check for bots before saving the email. It's the last setting in that section, under No Thanks / Opt-In Skip Link.
Publish your quiz. The bot check starts working once the published version has it.
If your quiz has no Optin Page and collects emails with the Results page sign-up instead, the same checkbox is on the Results Page, in the Email Sign-up section, under the sign-up's text fields.
What your customers see
The quiz looks and works the same. Google checks the sign-up in the background while the customer is on the email step, and the check doesn't add any steps.
Google shows a small reCAPTCHA badge in the bottom-right corner of the page once the email step appears.
What happens when Google flags a sign-up as a bot
The quiz still shows the results, so a real customer who's flagged by mistake still gets their recommendations.
The email, phone number, name and marketing consent from that sign-up aren't saved in Lantern.
Your email tools (Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, Brevo and ActiveCampaign) don't receive the sign-up, and no Shopify customer is created for it.
Integrations that receive every completed quiz, such as webhooks, Zapier, Shopify Flow and Google Sheets, still receive the quiz answers, but without the email, phone number or name.
On the Results page sign-up, the customer sees the usual thank-you message, but the email isn't saved or sent anywhere.
The session still shows in Reporting and still counts as a quiz taker.
Good to know
The bot check is included on every plan and is off until you turn it on.
Test runs from the quiz editor's Preview aren't checked.
For about the first week, Google lets almost every sign-up through while it learns what normal quiz traffic looks like. The check gets stricter on its own after that.
If a customer's browser blocks Google reCAPTCHA (a few privacy extensions do), their sign-up counts as a bot. This is rare.
reCAPTCHA is a Google service, so you may want to mention it in your store's privacy policy.
For an extra layer of protection, turn on double opt-in for your list in your email tool. New subscribers then confirm their address by email before they're added.