Citing an AI tool trips people up for a reasonable reason: there's no human author, no publication date in the usual sense, and the "source" produces a different answer every time someone else tries to look it up. APA and MLA have each published their own answer to this, and APA's changed as recently as September 2025 — so here's the current format for both, and what each actually requires you to include.
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APA Style updated its generative-AI guidance in September 2025, so older blog posts and screenshots floating around — including some that are still widely linked — show an outdated format. Under the current rules, the reference entry for citing a tool in general is: Company. (Year). Title of tool or model [Large language model]. URL. For example: OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com/
The developer is treated as the author — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — never ChatGPT or the model itself, since APA doesn't allow an AI system to be listed as an author. The date is the year the tool was last updated, not the date you used it. A specific version number is now optional rather than required, which is the main thing that changed from the earlier 2023 guidance.
In-text, it's the same pattern as any other APA source: parenthetical (OpenAI, 2025), or narrative OpenAI (2025). If you need readers to see the exact output you got rather than just acknowledging you used the tool, APA's current guidance also allows citing a specific chat by its date and title instead of the tool generally — worth doing if a professor wants to see precisely what the AI generated.
MLA takes a different approach: it treats your prompt — the actual text you typed in — as the "title" of the source, followed by the word "prompt." The works-cited entry looks like: "Full text of your prompt" prompt. Tool Name, version/date information, Company Name, date generated, URL. The AI tool is never listed as an author under MLA's rules either.
In-text, MLA shortens that prompt down to its first few words in quotation marks — for example ("Describe a rose"). MLA also notes there's currently no reliable way to link directly to one specific AI-generated answer, so the works-cited entry links to the tool's general site instead, unless the tool gives you a stable, shareable link to that exact conversation.
An AI chat doesn't have a URL or DOI to auto-fetch the way a webpage or journal article does, so this is one of the few source types where auto-fetch citation tools — including StudyPilot's — can't pull the details for you automatically. Manual entry is the way to go: plug in the developer's name as the author, the tool name as the title, and the year, and the generator will handle the punctuation, italics, and ordering correctly for APA, MLA, or whichever of its six supported styles your course requires.
Before any of this, it's worth checking your course's actual policy. Some instructors want AI use cited any time it touched your work at all; others only want a citation if you're quoting or closely paraphrasing something the AI generated, and treat using it for grammar help or brainstorming differently. The citation format doesn't change either way — but whether you need one at all depends entirely on what your professor's syllabus says, not on APA or MLA's general rules.
Plug in the developer, tool name, and date, and StudyPilot formats it correctly in APA, MLA, or four other styles.
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