APA Citation and Paper Formatting Guide (APA 7th Edition): ChatGPT & Generative AI

Include a reference and in-text citation for a specific AI chat foremostly when doing so will be helpful for readers.

Here is a reference template for a specific AI chat:

To create example references for this scenario, APA asked four AI tools for a list of grammar concepts that students should know by the end of high school. Their prompt was “I’d like a list of grammar topics that a student should understand by the time they graduate from high school.” See example references below:

Notes on selecting the four elements of author, date, title, and source for your references to an AI chat: 

• Author: The author is the company responsible for developing the AI tool. AI itself cannot be an author because it is not a living, conscious human who can give consent and promise to abide by the rights and responsibilities that come with authorship. For example, OpenAI is the author of ChatGPT, and Google is the author of Gemini.
• Date: The date in an AI chat reference is the specific year, month, and day on which a chat occurred or concluded.
• Title: The title is the title of the chat (in italic sentence case) followed by a bracketed description to clarify for readers the nature of the source; for example, “[Generative AI chat].” Adapt the wording within square brackets as needed; it is flexible so you can choose wording that will “best convey the information readers need” (per Section 9.21 of the Publication Manual; APA, 2020, p. 292). In most AI tools, users can edit the title of the chat, so before creating the reference, consider editing the title within the AI tool to be something descriptive and helpful for readers.
• Source: The source begins with the name of the AI tool, which can be general (e.g., ChatGPT or Gemini) or the name of the model (e.g., ChatGPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Flash). The final piece of the source element is the URL of the chat.

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It is also possible to cite an AI tool generally and not a specific chat. Cite an AI tool generally when it would be unhelpful, unethical, or otherwise inappropriate to cite a specific chat—as well as when you want to point to the existence of the AI tool but not necessarily cite specific information from it.

Here is the template for citing an AI tool generally:

Here are some example references for AI tools as a whole/generally:

• The author is the company responsible for developing the AI tool.
• The date is the year in which the AI tool was most recently updated. If you are unsure of the date, ask the AI. If the tool does not indicate the date of last update, use the copyright date provide on the website or app.
• The title is the name of the AI tool, which can be general (e.g., ChatGPT or Gemini) or the name of the model (e.g., ChatGPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Flash).
• Provide a description of the AI in brackets after the title. For chat tools, currently “[Large language model]” is usually correct. But, other descriptions are possible; use the description that best fits the type of AI model or tool used.
• The source element is only the URL of the AI tool because the author and publisher of the AI are the same. As in all APA Style references in which the author is the same as the publisher, that name is included only once in the reference (in the author element).

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Students should document the prompts used with AI tools for their own records. To the extent that it helps readers, these prompts can be included where the AI use is disclosed. Whether that’s appropriate and useful for readers is a decision you should make in conjunction with your instructor. 

For example, within a chat with AI, you might begin with one prompt and then refine the prompt after seeing the output. When writing about the prompt(s), for example, you might say something like this:

The reference you create would be for the chat, not the prompt(s).

Providing information about prompts increases transparency, helps readers better understand exactly how you used the AI tool, and could even help with future research replications or extensions of your work. For example, future researchers could try using the same prompt(s) with other models and/or AI tools.

Thus, when deemed useful for readers, prompts can be described in the text, but they are not included in the reference.

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APA no longer advises including the version number in every AI reference by default. Instead, include the model name if it is available (it is also acceptable to just use the name of the tool).

What’s the difference between a model and a version? A model refers to the architecture of the AI model. For example, when using ChatGPT, a general name for the tool, you may choose ChatGPT-4-turbo or ChatGPT-5, two different models of ChatGPT. Newer models may have dramatically more sophisticated reasoning capabilities and outputs than older models. If you are unsure what model of an AI tool you are using, ask the AI.

In contrast, version numbers generally indicate iterations of a model. Although AI tools frequently allow the user to select the model they want to use, the user likely does not have the same leeway to select a version of that model. Instead, the tools generally provide users with the most current version of the selected model.

Thus, a reference to ChatGPT should include either “ChatGPT” as a general name or “ChatGPT-5” as the name of a specific model, but the version number need not be included.

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