A range of highly efficient nanoheterojunction structured Ag-AgBr/TiO2 photocatalysts have been synthesized by CTAB-assisted method and characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM), energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) and photoluminescence (PL). The results demonstrated that Ag-AgBr nanoparticles were successfully deposited on the surface of anatase TiO2 hierarchical spheres. The remarkable adsorptive removal of methyl orange (MO) by the uncalcined samples was investigated before evaluating its photocatalytic ability. All the calcined three-component catalysts possessed excellent photocatalytic activities for degrading MO under visible light, in which, 162.4% Ag-AgBr/TiO2 exhibited highest efficiency. The greatly enhanced activity can be attributed to the well combination of surface plasmons photocatalyst Ag-AgBr and TiO2, which can simultaneously inhibit the photo-generated electrons and holes recombination. The nanoheterojunctions architecture catalyst also showed high stability even after five consecutive cycles. Meanwhile, the possible mechanism and interpretation of the photocatalytic process were also proposed. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.