---
title: "Shield Overview"
description: "Free, privacy-first bot protection without puzzles. Verify humans, route agents, and stop abuse with a 1–100 humanity score on every check."
url: https://edge.network/docs/shield/
---

# Shield Overview

Shield

# Edge Shield

A lightweight CAPTCHA alternative. Shield verifies visitors invisibly — no puzzles, no
cookies, no tracking — and returns a 1–100 humanity score your application can act on.
Free forever, with unlimited verifications.

## Key Features

### Invisible Verification

A proof-of-work challenge solved in a background thread. Real visitors almost never
see anything — and never label traffic lights.

### Humanity Score

Every verification carries a 1–100 score — 1 is confirmed automation, 100 a confirmed
human. Allow, step up, redirect, or block on your own thresholds.

### Privacy by Architecture

No cookies, no fingerprint database, no per-visitor storage. Only hourly aggregate
counters are kept — GDPR and CCPA friendly by default.

### Turnstile-Compatible

The siteverify response matches Cloudflare Turnstile's exactly, plus the score.
Migrating is a URL and key swap.

## How It Works

1
The widget requests a challenge

A cryptographically signed challenge is issued by the Shield service. Difficulty
adapts to risk signals — clean browsers get trivial work.

2
The browser solves it invisibly

A SHA-256 proof-of-work runs in a Web Worker — tens of milliseconds on a phone,
with no impact on your Core Web Vitals.

3
A response token is minted

The solution plus coarse environment signals produce a signed, single-use token
containing the humanity score. It's added to your form automatically.

4
Your server validates the token

One POST to siteverify with your secret key returns the verdict, hostname, and
score. Tokens expire after 5 minutes and can be used exactly once.

## Pricing

Shield's core protection is **free forever** — unlimited
widgets, unlimited verifications, all three widget modes, and the humanity score included.
There are no monthly assessment caps and no credit card required.

## Get Started

[Getting Started Protect your first form in five minutes](https://edge.network/docs/shield/getting-started) [Widget Modes Managed, non-interactive, and invisible](https://edge.network/docs/shield/widget-modes) [Server-Side Validation The siteverify API and humanity score](https://edge.network/docs/shield/siteverify) [Migrating from Turnstile A drop-in swap, step by step](https://edge.network/docs/shield/turnstile-migration)
[Back to Docs](https://edge.network/docs) [Need help?](https://edge.network/support)