By the Deslop desk · Published 16 Aug 2026 · Checked against APA Style's published guidance
Every guide opens with the same example. Smith, J. (2023). Neat surname, neat initial, neat date.
Then you go back to the page you actually need to cite. It is a government fact sheet. There is no byline anywhere on it. The only date says "last reviewed", and you are not sure that counts. The guide has stopped being useful at exactly the point you needed it.
That page is the normal case, not the awkward one. So this guide starts there.
Each reference below came out of our own citation generator, not from a worked example we typed by hand. What you see is what the tool gives you.
Note the title is in italics and in sentence case. Only the first word gets a capital, plus any proper nouns. The site name comes after the title, without italics.
Organisation names are never abbreviated to initials in the author slot. Write the name in full, exactly as the organisation writes it.
The site name has gone. That is deliberate. APA's guidance on webpage references says that because the author and the site name are the same, you omit the site name to avoid repeating yourself. A great many generators repeat it anyway.
The title has moved to the front, where the author would have been. The date follows it. This is the rule that trips people, and getting it wrong is obvious to a marker, because the reference opens with a bare bracket.
This deserves its own section, because it is the most common mistake in student bibliographies and the easiest to fix.
APA's guidance on missing information is direct. When a work is not actually signed "Anonymous", the title moves to the beginning of the reference and stands in place of the author's name. It does not stay where it was while the date slides forward.
Do not write Anonymous as the author. APA reserves that for works genuinely signed that way, which almost none are.
Your in-text citation has to match, because the reader finds the reference by looking up whatever comes first. So it becomes the first few words of the title, formatted the way the reference formats it. A webpage title is italicised in the reference, so it is italicised in the citation too.
Use the most specific date you can find. Year, month and day if it is there.
If a page shows a "last reviewed" date, ignore it. APA's position is that content which has been reviewed has not necessarily been changed, so a review date tells you nothing about the version you read. A "last updated" date is different, and you can use it when it clearly belongs to the content you are citing rather than to the whole site.
No date at all means (n.d.). That is it.
Now the retrieval date. Most people add one to every web source out of caution, and it is wrong nearly every time. APA's rule is narrow: include a retrieval date only when the contents of a page are designed to change over time and the page is not archived. The style guide's own summary is that most references do not include one.
A news article does not qualify. A fact sheet does not qualify. A live population counter does. A stock index page does. A dictionary entry that gets revised does. If your source will still say the same thing next year, you do not need one.
Use the webpage format only when the work does not fit a better category. Plenty of things that live at a URL are not webpages in APA's sense.
A journal article is a journal article, even as a PDF. A newspaper story is a newspaper story, even if you read it on the paper's site. A government report is a report. Each has its own format, and using the webpage pattern for them loses information your reader needs, like the volume number or the report number.
There is also a rule people miss at the other end of the scale. You do not write a reference for an entire website. If you want to mention a site in general rather than a particular page on it, name it in your sentence and put the URL in brackets.
Our own generator handled three of the four situations correctly and got the fourth one wrong.
With no author, it produced this: (2023, November 16). How to read a nutrition label. A reference opening with a bare date, which is the exact error this article warns about. The in-text citation was worse. It printed the literal word "Title", because a placeholder was reaching real output.
We found it by testing every source type against every combination of missing information, 126 outputs in total, rather than only the tidy examples in the manual. Both are fixed. We are telling you because a citation tool that hides its failures is worth less than one that shows them, and because you should hold every other generator to the same standard.
Four checks, thirty seconds.
Does the reference start with a name or a title, never a date? Does the first word of your in-text citation match the first word of the reference? Is the page title in sentence case and italics, with the site name in neither? Does every URL actually load?
Then check your department's guidance. Style rules have edge cases, and your marker's handout beats any website, including this one.
Four situations, two questions. Is there an author, and is there a date. With no author, the title moves to the front and the date follows it, and your in-text citation has to move with it. Skip the retrieval date unless the page is built to change. Everything else is sentence case and patience.
Build the citation free, nothing leaves your browser →Sources: APA Style, webpage on a website references, on organisation authors, italicised titles and omitting a repeated site name. APA Style, missing reference information, on the title moving to the author position and on not using Anonymous. APA Style, elements of reference list entries, on retrieval dates being needed only for unarchived works designed to change. Publication Manual (7th ed.) Section 10.16 covers webpage references. Our own output: generated 16 August 2026 with the Deslop citation engine, tested across 126 combinations of source type, style and missing information. More: citation generator · AI checker · all articles.