A citation and a disclosure are different things, and most students only get told about one of them. A citation says where a claim came from. A disclosure says what you did. If a tool shaped your work you usually owe your reader both, and doing one does not excuse the other.
Style guides are revising this faster than course handbooks can keep up — APA changed its advice in September 2025. Each section links to the official page. Check it before you submit rather than trusting a slide from last year.
Before the format: should you be citing it at all?
If you are citing an AI tool as the source of a fact, something has already gone wrong. The tool has no page, no method and no accountability, and the claim it gave you either came from somewhere real or it did not exist. Find the handbook, the textbook or the paper, read it, and cite that.
Citing the tool is right when the output itself is the thing you are discussing — you quoted it, analysed it, tested it, or built on wording it produced. That is a genuine object of study. "It told me the pKa" is not.
By style guide
The four your course is most likely to use.
APA (7th edition)
Revised September 2025 — most guides online still show the 2023 version.
APA’s original 2023 advice treated a chat as unretrievable, on the reasoning that nobody else could open your conversation. That changed once tools began issuing share links. APA’s current position is that a specific chat with a shareable URL is cited like any other source, following the ordinary author–date–title–source pattern: the company as author, the year, the title of the chat, a bracketed descriptor such as Large language model, and the URL.
Two details that trip people up. The version belongs with the title, in whatever format the company itself uses. And APA is explicit that citing is not the same as disclosing — if AI shaped the writing, describe what you did in the text as well, because transparency is what lets a reader evaluate the work.
Where a conversation is central to your argument, put the transcript in an appendix and refer to it. Each session generates different output from the same prompt, so the exact text matters.
MLA treats the tool as a container, the same way it treats a website or an app, and builds the entry from its template of core elements. In place of an author it uses a description of what you asked for, in quotation marks, followed by the tool as the title of the container, the version, the company as publisher, the date of your session and the URL.
The in-text citation points at your description rather than at a person, since MLA’s position is that the tool is not an author. MLA also asks you to vouch for any secondary source the tool mentioned — track it down and cite it directly, or leave it out.
Chicago has generally preferred keeping AI out of the bibliography and handling it in the text or in a note, on the grounds that a conversation is not a retrievable source. A note naming the tool, the company, the date and the nature of the prompt is usually enough, and if your prompt is not clear from the surrounding sentence, include it.
Chicago has been revising its guidance as share links became normal, so check the current Q&A before you submit rather than trusting a lecture slide from last year.
Chemistry and the other sciences mostly do not want a reference at all. Their instinct is that a reference list points at things a reader can obtain and evaluate, which a private conversation is not, so the disclosure goes in the methods, the experimental section or the acknowledgements instead — stating which tool, which version, what it was used for, and who checked the output.
Journal policies here are stricter than course policies and worth knowing early: publishers broadly agree that an AI tool cannot be listed as an author, because authorship carries accountability that software cannot hold. Check your own course’s requirement and the specific journal’s instructions, because these differ more than the humanities styles do.
Save the share link, the date, the tool and version, and the prompts, at the time — not afterwards. Re-running the same prompt will not reproduce the same output, so a transcript you did not keep is gone. It is also the single most useful thing to have if anyone ever questions whether the work is yours: a dated trail showing how it developed is worth far more than any argument about style.
Four things not to do
Citing the tool for a fact instead of finding the real source.
Citing a paper the tool told you about but you have not opened. Resolve the DOI first.
Listing an AI tool as an author or co-author — no publisher permits it.
Assuming a citation satisfies a disclosure requirement, or the reverse.