Chemically manipulated anomalous Hall effect (AHE) and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) have been studied in MgO/[Co/Pt](3)/MgO multilayers by introducing a Mg metal layer between the Co layer and the top MgO layer. It is shown that the saturation anomalous Hall resistivity (pAH) and effective magnetic anisotropy (rho(AH)) are 125% and 26% larger than those in the multilayers without Mg insertion, respectively. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis shows that the enhancement of AHE and PMA is primarily ascribed to effective control of chemical states at the Co/MgO interface. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.