When to Use It's vs. Its: A Simple Rule to Avoid Embarrassment

  >It's is a contraction and should be used where a sentence would normally read "it is." The apostrophe indicates that part of a word has been removed. Its with no apostrophe, on the other hand, is the possessive word, like "his" and "her," FOR NOUNS WITHOUT GENDER  [my emphasis]

As someone who prides myself on being pretty literate [which is a nailed-on guarantee this post is going to contain typos galore!], I think this article slightly misses the point.

The reason otherwise literate people make this mistake [and I'll admit to having done so myself, in the past] is because the dual-purpose of the apostrophe in English leads to both options appearing correct.

* On the one hand we have the apostrophe as 'missing letter/s signifier'. So: it's = it [i]s

* But, on the other hand, we have the apostrophe as 'possssion signifier'. So it's also logical [if not grammatically correct] to assume it's = belonging to it

The 'nouns without gender' is the significant and oft-overlooked sub-clause here. And the reason I consider this particular grammatical faux pas to be more forgiveable than the dreaded Greengrocer's Apostrophe [0]

[0]https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?lui=english&language=eng...

If you do s/it’s/its/ for user submitted text on a website you get superhuman (typical human, not best human) performance.