How to Cite a Website in Chicago Style (18th Edition)

To cite a website in Chicago style (18th edition), give the title of the page in quotation marks, the name of the website, the owner or sponsor if it differs from the site name, a publication or revision date, and the URL. A personal author, when the page names one, goes first. Add an access date only when the page shows no date at all.

Full note: 1. Author First Last, "Title of Page," Name of Website, Owner (if different), Month Day, Year, URL. Short note: 2. Last, "Short Title." Bibliography: Last, First. "Title of Page." Name of Website. Month Day, Year. URL.

When the page has no personal author, the note opens with the page title and the bibliography entry goes under the organization that owns the site. The worked examples below show that switch several times.

Several examples come from the Chicago Manual of Style's notes and bibliography sample citations, so you can check every comma against the publisher's own page. The rest use live pages checked on October 24, 2026.

How to cite a website in Chicago style: the 18th edition pattern

Here is a privacy policy cited three ways, straight from Chicago's sample page. Google owns the site, and no person is named as author.

`

1. "Privacy Policy," Privacy & Terms, Google, effective November 15, 2023, https://policies.google.com/privacy.

1. Google, "Privacy Policy."

Google. "Privacy Policy." Privacy & Terms. Effective November 15, 2023. https://policies.google.com/privacy. `

The first line is the full note. It runs in this order: page title in quotation marks, the name of the website, the owner, the date, the URL. Commas separate the parts and the note ends with a period after the URL.

The second line is the shortened note, for every later citation of the same page. It keeps the owner and the page title and drops everything else. A web page has no page numbers, so there is nothing to add after the title.

The third line is the bibliography entry. Chicago puts it under the owner or sponsor of the site, so Google moves to the front. Periods replace the commas, and "effective" becomes "Effective" because it now opens a sentence-like unit. The date label ("effective," "last modified," "published") follows whatever the page itself says.

Chicago is relaxed about whether you need a formal citation at all. Its sample page says that "it is often sufficient simply to describe web pages and other website content in the text," and gives the example "As of November 15, 2023, Google's privacy policy stated . . ." If you mention a page once in passing, a sentence like that can do the job. If you quote it, rely on it for evidence, or your instructor wants every source in the bibliography, cite it formally.

The five elements of a Chicago website citation

1. Author or owner

Use a personal author when the page names one, in normal order in the note (Sarah Friedman) and inverted in the bibliography (Friedman, Sarah). Purdue OWL's Chicago 18 web sources page adds that a screen name or handle can stand in when the real name is not available.

When no person is named, the organization that owns or sponsors the site takes the author slot in the bibliography. In the note, Chicago's examples start with the page title instead. When there is neither a person nor a clear organization, the title leads in both places and you alphabetize the bibliography entry by the first word of the title that is not "A," "An," or "The."

2. Title of the page

Put the title of the specific page in quotation marks and capitalize it in headline style (major words capitalized). That applies to an article, a blog post, a policy page, or a single entry on a larger site. Purdue notes one exception: generic page labels such as "Help" or "About" can go without quotation marks.

3. Name of the website

The website's own name goes after the page title, in headline-style capitals, set in roman with no quotation marks and no italics. "Privacy & Terms," "Olympic National Park" and "Wikipedia" all stay roman.

Italics come in for two kinds of site. Blogs are italicized (In Custodia Legis), and so are online publications that work like a printed newspaper, magazine or journal (New York Times, Wired). Purdue's summary of the 18th edition also lets you italicize a website that behaves like a traditional publication even if it never had a print version, and keeps Wikipedia in roman. Its advice for the unclear cases is short: "If in doubt regarding whether to use roman or italics, roman is the safer choice."

If the owner has the same name as the site (World Health Organization on who.int), give the name once.

4. Date

Chicago wants the date the content was published or last revised. Pages label it in different ways: "published," "last modified," "updated," "effective," "reviewed." Use the page's own date and make clear which kind it is when it is a revision date. Purdue shows both together when a page lists both:

Published April 26, 2019; last modified May 17, 2019.

Access dates are the fallback. Chicago's sample page says: "If a source does not list a date of publication or revision, include an access date." If the page shows a date, leave the access date out. The access date goes in the same slot, just before the URL:

`

1. "About Yale: Yale Facts," Yale University, accessed March 8, 2022, https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.

`

Chicago also offers a second option for undated pages: cite an archived copy from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine or a similar service, with the word "archived" and the capture date. That gives your reader the exact version you read, which matters for pages that change without warning.

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1. "About Yale: Yale Facts," Yale University, archived March 8, 2022, at https://web.archive.org/web/20220308143337/https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.

`

5. URL

Copy the full URL from the address bar and put it last. In a note, a comma comes before it and a period after it. In a bibliography entry, a period comes before and after. Keep the https://.

Notes-bibliography or author-date?

Chicago has two citation systems, and a website looks different in each. History, philosophy, religious studies and most of the humanities use notes-bibliography: superscript numbers in your text, footnotes or endnotes with the details, and a bibliography at the end. Most of this guide uses that system. For the system as a whole, see our guide to Chicago notes-bibliography style.

The sciences and social sciences more often use author-date: a short citation in parentheses in your sentence, and a reference list at the end. The Chicago author-date sample page gives the same privacy policy like this:

` Google. 2023. "Privacy Policy." Privacy & Terms. Effective November 15. https://policies.google.com/privacy.

(Google 2023) `

Two things move. The year jumps up to sit right after the author, and the month and day stay behind in the date slot without repeating the year. For an undated page, author-date puts n.d. ("no date") where the year would be and still adds the access date:

Yale University. n.d. "About Yale: Yale Facts." Accessed March 8, 2022. https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.

Pick the system your instructor or journal names, and stay with it for the whole paper. Our author-date guide covers in-text citations for every other source type.

Worked examples

All of these are notes-bibliography. Each shows the full note, the shortened note and the bibliography entry. The code blocks cannot show italics, so each example says which part to italicize.

1. Organization page with a "last updated" date

The National Park Service page on the Elwha River lists no author and shows "Last updated: March 28, 2025" at the bottom.

`

1. "History of the Elwha," Olympic National Park, National Park Service, last modified March 28, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/olym/learn/nature/history-of-the-elwha.htm.

1. National Park Service, "History of the Elwha."

National Park Service. "History of the Elwha." Olympic National Park. Last modified March 28, 2025. https://www.nps.gov/olym/learn/nature/history-of-the-elwha.htm. `

This follows the same model as the Google example. Olympic National Park is the section of the site you are on, and the National Park Service owns it. Nothing is italicized. "Last modified" is Chicago's usual label for a revision date. You can also write "last updated" to match the page; pick one wording and use it every time.

2. Page where the owner and the site share a name

The World Health Organization's fact sheet on drinking water carries no personal author and a publication date of September 13, 2023.

`

1. "Drinking-Water," World Health Organization, September 13, 2023, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water.

1. World Health Organization, "Drinking-Water."

World Health Organization. "Drinking-Water." September 13, 2023. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water. `

The organization appears once in the note, as the site name, because repeating "World Health Organization, World Health Organization" adds nothing. In the bibliography it moves to the author slot and does not appear again after the title. The page prints its title as "Drinking-water"; headline style capitalizes both parts of a hyphenated compound like this one.

3. Blog post with a named author

A post on In Custodia Legis, the Law Library of Congress blog, by Sarah Friedman, dated October 21, 2026.

`

1. Sarah Friedman, "America's First Murder Trial," In Custodia Legis (blog), October 21, 2026, https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2026/10/americas-first-murder-trial/.

1. Friedman, "America's First Murder Trial."

Friedman, Sarah. "America's First Murder Trial." In Custodia Legis (blog). October 21, 2026. https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2026/10/americas-first-murder-trial/. `

Italicize In Custodia Legis. Add "(blog)" in parentheses when the blog's name does not already make that clear, and leave it off when the word "blog" is in the name. The short title here is the whole title because it is only four words long.

Purdue notes that Chicago generally cites blog posts in notes only, and adds a bibliography entry when you cite the blog often. If your instructor wants every source in the bibliography, include it; the format above is ready.

4. Article on a news site

News and magazine websites are cited like their print versions, with the URL added. This example is from Chicago's own sample page.

`

1. Dani Blum, "Are Flax Seeds All That?," New York Times, December 13, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/well/eat/flax-seeds-benefits.html.

1. Blum, "Flax Seeds."

Blum, Dani. "Are Flax Seeds All That?" New York Times, December 13, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/well/eat/flax-seeds-benefits.html. `

Italicize New York Times. Look at the punctuation after the question mark: in the note, the title's own question mark is followed by a comma inside the closing quotation mark. In the bibliography, the question mark ends the unit and no period is added. The bibliography also keeps a comma between the newspaper and the date, which is how Chicago treats periodicals, not the period it uses for an ordinary website.

Our guide to citing an article from a website in APA 7 covers the APA version of the same decision, which sorts news sites from other web pages in a similar way.

5. Wikipedia page with a time stamp

Chicago's sample page cites a Wikipedia page under its owner, the Wikimedia Foundation, and includes the time of the last edit, because Wikipedia pages can change several times a day.

`

1. "Wikipedia: Manual of Style," Wikimedia Foundation, last modified December 19, 2023, 21:54 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style.

1. "Wikipedia: Manual of Style."

Wikimedia Foundation. "Wikipedia: Manual of Style." Last modified December 19, 2023, at 21:54 (UTC). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style. `

You find the time stamp at the bottom of the article ("This page was last edited on . . .") or in the page history. Note the small change between the two forms: the note uses a comma before the time, and the bibliography uses ", at."

6. Page with no date

Use the Yale example from the access-date section above: the page title, the owner, "accessed" and the date you read it, then the URL. The shortened note is the title alone or a short form of it:

`

1. "About Yale: Yale Facts," Yale University, accessed March 8, 2022, https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.

1. "Yale Facts."

Yale University. "About Yale: Yale Facts." Accessed March 8, 2022. https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts. `

The short title "Yale Facts" keeps the words that identify the page and drops "About Yale," which only repeats the owner.

7. Archived copy of a page

When you cite the Wayback Machine capture instead of the live page, replace "accessed" with "archived," keep the capture date, and add "at" before the archive URL:

`

1. "About Yale: Yale Facts," Yale University, archived March 8, 2022, at https://web.archive.org/web/20220308143337/https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.

Yale University. "About Yale: Yale Facts." Archived March 8, 2022, at https://web.archive.org/web/20220308143337/https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts. `

The archive URL contains the original address after the capture time stamp, so a reader can still see which site the page came from.

8. Two pages from the same website

Each page gets its own note and its own bibliography entry. In the bibliography, both sit under the owner and are ordered by page title. Chicago 18 now prefers repeating the author's name for each entry over the old 3-em dash, a change the University of Portland lists in its summary of what is new in Chicago 18. Our guide to alphabetizing a Chicago bibliography covers the ordering rules in detail.

Social media, comments and forum posts

Chicago treats social media as something you can often cite in your text alone. Its sample page puts it this way: citations of social media content "can usually be limited to the text," a note can be added when a formal citation is needed, and a bibliography entry is appropriate only "in rare cases." Here is the text-only form from the sample page:

The Instagram post included a photo of the president delivering a eulogy at the National Cathedral and referred to O'Connor as "gracious and principled" (@potus, December 19, 2023).

A post has no title, so the text of the post takes the title's place in quotation marks. The Chicago 18 sample page allows "up to the first 280 characters of the post." Keep the original spelling, capitalization and emoji. Older guides, including parts of Purdue's page, give a 160-character limit; the 280 figure is the one on Chicago's current sample page.

When you need a note:

`

1. Chicago Manual of Style, "Is the world ready for singular they? We thought so back in 1993," Facebook, April 17, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/ChicagoManual/posts/10152906193679151.

Chicago Manual of Style. "Is the world ready for singular they? We thought so back in 1993." Facebook, April 17, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/ChicagoManual/posts/10152906193679151. `

The post's text keeps its own capitalization ("Is the world ready . . ."), so headline style does not apply to it. When the account has both a name and a handle, give the name first and the handle in parentheses: NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb).

Comments are cited by reference to the post they answer. The commenter's name, the date and time, and "comment on" followed by the shortened citation of the original post:

`

1. Michele Truty, April 17, 2015, 1:09 p.m., comment on Chicago Manual of Style, "singular they."

`

Forum threads such as Reddit work like posts, but use the thread title in place of post text and name the forum along with the platform. Purdue's example:

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1. u/labtec901, "Accepted Undergrad Questions Megathread," r/Purdue, Reddit, January 14, 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/ag3841/.

`

Direct messages and posts in private groups are personal communications. Chicago cites them in the text or a note and rarely in the bibliography: "1. Sam Gomez, Facebook direct message to author, August 1, 2024." Include a time stamp only when it matters to your point or when you cite two posts from the same account on the same day.

Posts get deleted. Purdue recommends taking a screenshot of anything you plan to cite, so a later edit or deletion does not leave your argument resting on a dead link.

Special cases

The page has no author and no organization

Start the note with the page title, then the site name, the date and the URL. Start the bibliography entry with the title too, and alphabetize it by the first word that is not an article. Purdue's example:

`

1. "Band," Casa de Calexico, accessed October 27, 2017, http://www.casadecalexico.com/band.

"Band." Casa de Calexico. Accessed October 27, 2017. http://www.casadecalexico.com/band. `

Purdue italicizes Casa de Calexico here because it is the site of a band and treats it as a named work. Many site names stay roman; see the website-name rules above.

The page lists both a publication date and an update

Give the most recent date that applies to the version you read, labeled ("last modified"). If you want to show both, follow Purdue: "Published April 26, 2019; last modified May 17, 2019."

The page changed after you read it

Purdue's advice is to add a note to that effect, specifying "as of [date]" when you can. An archived copy (example 7) is the stronger fix, because your reader can open exactly what you saw.

The author goes by a handle or pseudonym

Use the handle in the author slot when the real name is not available. In the bibliography, a handle is not inverted: u/labtec901 stays u/labtec901.

A PDF or report posted on a website

A report, white paper or government document that happens to be hosted on a website is cited as that kind of document, with the URL added at the end. Cite it as a report, a book or a government publication, depending on what it is. The website format above is for content that exists only as a web page.

The site is an online journal or an ebook platform

A journal article you read online is still a journal article. Cite it with volume, issue and DOI. A book read on a website is still a book. Our Chicago book guide covers ebooks and books consulted online.

Shortened notes and ibid.

After the first full note, every later citation of the same page uses the shortened note: author or owner, plus a short form of the title in quotation marks. Titles of four words or fewer stay whole. Longer titles shrink to two to four key words in their original order, without an opening article.

Chicago 18 discourages "ibid." The University of Portland's short-form page puts the reason plainly: ibid. "can obscure the identity of a source." Repeat the shortened note even when you cite the same page twice in a row:

`

1. Friedman, "America's First Murder Trial."
2. Friedman, "America's First Murder Trial."

`

If your instructor's style sheet still asks for ibid., follow it. Chicago discourages the abbreviation without banning it.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Adding an access date to a dated page. Chicago adds "accessed" only when the page shows no publication or revision date. Delete it if the page has a date.
• Putting the organization first in the note. In Chicago's own examples, an unauthored page opens with its title in the note and moves the owner to the front only in the bibliography. Students who copy the bibliography order into the footnote get the owner first in both.
• Italicizing every website name. Ordinary site names are roman. Italics are for blogs and for publications such as newspapers and magazines.
• Repeating the owner when it matches the site name. "World Health Organization, World Health Organization" should be one name.
• Mixing note and bibliography punctuation. Notes use commas throughout and normal name order. Bibliography entries use periods between the main parts and invert the first author's name. Check one of each side by side before you submit.
• Citing a news article as a website. An article on a newspaper's site takes the newspaper's name in italics, and the bibliography keeps a comma before the date.
• Leaving out the URL in a footnote. The full note carries the URL. Only the shortened note drops it.
• Treating a post's text as a headline. Social media text keeps its original capitalization and spelling; do not convert it to headline style.

Quick-reference table