In this study, the gold nanoparticles were deposited on the surface of tungstophosphoric acid immobilized TiO2 nanotubes, in which tungstophosphoric acid plays the roles of highly localized UV-switchable reducing agent and multifunctional photocatalyst linker molecule. The prepared novel nanocomposite was characterized with FUR, XRD, EDX and TEM and showed high photocatalytic efficiency in nitrobenzene removal. The results demonstrated that by introducing of AuNPs, the photocatalytic performance significantly enhanced, where the photocatalytic rate of using Au/HPW/TiO2-NTs nanocomposites was 4.1-fold increase compared to TiO2 nanotubes. The photocatalytic mechanism was proposed. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.