What solution should a Tech Consultant recommend to protect online grant application forms from spam submissions?

Implementing CAPTCHA is an effective solution for protecting online grant application forms from spam submissions. CAPTCHA serves as a challenge-response test to determine whether the user is human or an automated bot. By requiring users to solve a simple task, such as identifying images or typing distorted text, CAPTCHA acts as a barrier against automated scripts that often submit spam.

In the context of grant application forms, where receiving legitimate applications is crucial, utilizing CAPTCHA ensures that only human users can complete and submit the forms. This greatly reduces the risk of spam submissions, enhancing the quality of applications received.

The other choices may not directly address the issue of spam in the same effective way. For example, enabling the SF Spam Check for Experience Sites might provide some level of spam filtering, but it is not as robust as CAPTCHA in ensuring that an actual human is completing the form. Deploying OmniScripts could improve the user experience but does not inherently mitigate spam submissions. Providing a search page for application reference numbers does not contribute to spam protection either, as it focuses on application management post-submission and has no impact on the submission process itself.