This paper presents a new model-free adaptive fractional order control approach for linear time-varying systems. An online algorithm is proposed to determine some frequency characteristics using a selective filtering and to design a fractional PID controller based on the numerical optimization of the frequency domain criterion. When the system parameters are time-varying, the controller is updated to keep the same desired performances. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that the controller design depends only on the measured input and output signals of the process. The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed through a numerical example. (C) 2017 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.