How to Cite a Blog Post in MLA & APA: Formats + Examples (2026)

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Updated July 7, 2026

A blog post sits awkwardly between a webpage and an article, and the two big styles resolve that tension in opposite directions. MLA has no blog-specific rule at all: a post is a work on a website, handled by the universal template. APA declares, verbatim, that “blog posts follow the same format as journal articles.” Two different mental models for the same source — which is why a citation that looks right in one style is subtly wrong in the other. This guide follows the MLA Style Center and APA Style’s official blog pages exactly, including the parts most guides skip: username-only authors, comments, and platform blogs on Medium and Substack.

The shortest answer: in MLA, list the author, the post title in quotation marks, the blog name in italics, the day-month-year date, and the URL without https://. Author Last, First. “Title of Post.” Blog Name, Day Mon. Year, URL. In-text, cite the last name alone — no page number: (Ouellette).

What counts as a blog post

The format on this page covers any dated, authored post published to a blog — a standalone WordPress or Blogger site, a Substack newsletter’s web version, a Medium story, a company’s engineering blog, or a blog inside a larger publication. If it has a post title, a blog name, a date, and a URL, this template fits.

A few near-neighbors are better cited as something else:

• A static page on a website — an About page, a report, an undated resource — is a webpage, not a post.
• A news article on a paper’s main site follows the newspaper format; the line matters in Chicago, where a blog inside a publication carries the publication’s name too.
• A comment under a post has its own official format in APA and a forum-comment pattern in MLA — both are covered below.
• A post you read by email (a Substack issue in your inbox) should be cited from its public web version whenever one exists.

Information to collect before you cite

Everything you need is on the post itself:

• Author — real name if given; otherwise the username or screen name exactly as it appears. Both styles use it verbatim.
• Post title — quotation marks and title case in MLA; plain sentence case in APA.
• Blog name — italicized in both styles. On Medium or Substack, the publication or newsletter name is the blog name, not the platform’s slogan.
• Publication date — full day, month, and year. Both styles want all three.
• URL — MLA drops the https:// prefix; APA keeps the full URL. Strip tracking parameters (?utm_source=… and friends) in both.
• Access date — optional in MLA 9 but recommended for undated or frequently edited posts; APA wants a retrieval date only for unarchived content designed to change, which most posts are not.
• For a comment — the commenter’s displayed name, the comment’s date, and a link to the comment itself if the blog provides one.

The generator at / pulls the author, title, blog name, and date from a pasted post URL and formats all of it in seven styles. Double-check the author line — platform bylines sometimes show both a display name and a username, and you want the one printed with the post.

One blog post, formatted in all seven styles

The post below is the one APA Style uses in its own official “Blog post and blog comment references” page, so the APA row is the official reference verbatim. The MLA row applies the MLA Style Center’s universal online-work template to the same post.

The source: “Physicists Capture First Footage of Quantum Knots Unraveling in Superfluid,” a post by Jennifer Ouellette on the Ars Technica blog, published November 15, 2019. Accessed July 5, 2026.

Two details in that table do most of the separating. The first is the title’s dress code. MLA puts the post title in quotation marks and title case; APA strips both and leaves plain sentence case. The blog name, though, is italicized in both — treated like a journal or book title everywhere.

The second is the URL’s punctuation. MLA drops the https:// prefix and closes the entry with a period. APA keeps the full URL and ends with nothing — a period after an APA URL is the most common paste-error. Harvard, Vancouver, and AMA each bolt on an access date in their own dialect; MLA and APA need one only in the special cases covered below.

The in-text citation for the same post:

• MLA: (Ouellette) — no page number for an unpaginated web source
• APA: (Ouellette, 2019), or narrative: Ouellette (2019)
• Chicago: notes style is usual for blogs — Jennifer Ouellette, “Physicists Capture First Footage of Quantum Knots Unraveling in Superfluid,” Ars Technica (blog), November 15, 2019 — or (Ouellette 2019) in author-date
• Harvard: (Ouellette, 2019)
• Vancouver: (1), [1], or superscript ¹
• AMA: superscript ¹ only
• IEEE: [1]

How to cite a blog post in MLA

MLA 9 deliberately has no separate blog format. The MLA Style Center’s “How to Cite an Online Work” page gives one instruction for everything on the web: “list the author, the title of the work, the title of the website as the title of the container, and the publication details.” For a blog post that produces:

Author Last, First. “Title of Post.” Blog Name, Day Mon. Year, URL.

Applied to the post in the table:

Ouellette, Jennifer. “Physicists Capture First Footage of Quantum Knots Unraveling in Superfluid.” Ars Technica, 15 Nov. 2019, arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/study-you-can-tie-a-quantum-knot-in-a-superfluid-but-it-will-soon-untie-itself/.

Post title in quotation marks and title case; blog name italicized as the container; date in MLA’s day-month-year order; URL without https://. The in-text citation is the author’s last name with no page number — (Ouellette) — or just the name in your prose.

The variants you are most likely to need:

The blogger runs the blog but did not write the work you are citing. This is MLA’s own nuance, from its Ask the MLA answer on poems posted to blogs, and almost nobody covers it. The blogger who curates the whole site goes in the contributor slot after the blog name, tagged “created by” or “curated by.” MLA’s official example:

Blake, William. “Ah! Sun-flower.” Archetype, created by Michelle René Arch, 3 Aug. 2018, michellearch.wordpress.com.

But someone who merely posted another author’s work under their own account is credited right after the title instead, as “Posted by”:

Rhymer, Sharon. “A Cup of Tea for Me.” Posted by Frank Thomas. Poetry Blog, edited by Lynn Smith, 20 Sept. 2018, poetryblogs.com.

The author slot always belongs to whoever wrote the thing you are quoting.

No author, or no date. With no author, start the entry at the post title and use a shortened title in-text — details in the no-author guide. With no date, skip the date element and add an access date at the end: Accessed 5 July 2026. The access date is optional in MLA 9 generally, but recommended for undated or frequently revised posts — and blogs get edited quietly all the time.

A comment on a post. MLA’s model is its online-forum-comment format: the commenter’s username exactly as shown, a “Comment on” description in place of a title, then the container, date, and URL:

UserName123. Comment on “Physicists Capture First Footage of Quantum Knots Unraveling in Superfluid.” Ars Technica, 16 Nov. 2019, arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/study-you-can-tie-a-quantum-knot-in-a-superfluid-but-it-will-soon-untie-itself/?comments=1.

How to cite a blog post in APA

APA 7 covers blogs on its official “Blog post and blog comment references” page (Publication Manual, 7th ed., Section 10.1). The governing rule is one sentence: “Blog posts follow the same format as journal articles.” The blog name takes the journal-title slot — “Italicize the name of the blog, the same as you would a journal title” — which gives:

Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of post in sentence case. Blog Name. URL.

APA’s official example:

Ouellette, J. (2019, November 15). Physicists capture first footage of quantum knots unraveling in superfluid. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/study-you-can-tie-a-quantum-knot-in-a-superfluid-but-it-will-soon-untie-itself/

Note everything the journal-article model implies: sentence-case post title with no quotation marks and no italics, italicized blog name, full date in the parentheses, full URL, and no period after the URL. In-text: (Ouellette, 2019) parenthetically, or Ouellette (2019) in the narrative.

A comment on a post has its own official APA format. Cite the commenter as the author “using the format that appears with the comment (i.e., a real name or a username),” give the comment’s title or up to its first 20 words, then a square-bracketed description naming the post, and “link to the comment itself if possible.” APA’s example, verbatim:

joachimr. (2019, November 19). We are relying on APA as our university style format - the university is located in Germany (Kassel). So I [Comment on the blog post “The transition to seventh edition APA Style”]. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/transition-seventh-edition#comment-4694866690

In-text: (joachimr, 2019). The username stands in for a surname with no adjustment — no brackets, no capitalization fix.

No author, no date. A screen name alone is a perfectly good APA author; use it exactly as displayed. With no name of any kind, move the post title into the author position. With no date, write (n.d.) in the date slot. A retrieval date is needed only when the content is designed to change and is not archived — a stable, dated post does not take one.

Edge cases

Your reference says “[Blog post]” or “Retrieved from.” That is APA 6, and it has been wrong since 2019 — yet many library guides and older PDFs still show it. APA 7 dropped the bracketed “[Blog post]” label and the “Retrieved from” phrase entirely: the post title stands bare, and the URL follows the blog name with nothing in front of it. If a guide you are copying from includes either, it is out of date.

The post is on Medium or Substack. Treat the publication or newsletter as the blog. A Medium story in a publication takes that publication’s name as the italicized container (Towards Data Science, not Medium); a self-published story takes Medium itself. A Substack post takes the newsletter’s name, never Substack; a WordPress-hosted blog takes its own name, never WordPress. The platform is just the printing press; the container is the masthead.

The author is the company. Corporate engineering and policy blogs often carry no personal byline; both styles put the organization in the author slot. In APA, keep the company as author even if its name resembles the blog’s — the webpage rule about omitting a site name that duplicates the author does not apply, because blogs follow the journal-article format, and journal articles always name their author.

Can you even cite a blog in an academic paper? Yes — every major style has a format for it, which settles the mechanics. Credibility is a separate judgment: a blog is self-published, strongest when the author is an identifiable expert and weakest when it is anonymous commentary. Cite blogs for opinion, testimony, or expert analysis; for factual claims, prefer the primary sources the post links to.

You need Chicago style. The Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed., 2024) cites blog posts in the notes: author, post title in quotation marks, blog title in italics with “(blog)” added in parentheses unless the word blog is part of the name, then the date and URL — Jennifer Ouellette, “Physicists Capture First Footage of Quantum Knots Unraveling in Superfluid,” Ars Technica (blog), November 15, 2019, then the URL. A blog inside a larger publication adds the publication’s name after the blog title. Blogs normally stay out of the bibliography unless frequently cited; the table above shows the author-date reference form our engine produces when your instructor wants a listed entry.

You need Harvard, AMA, or IEEE. Harvard has no single governing body; the most common pattern is Author (Year) Title of post, Blog Name, Day Month. Available at: URL (Accessed: date), as in the table. AMA 11 uses sentence case, adds the word blog after the blog’s name, and requires an access date: Ouellette J. Physicists capture first footage of quantum knots unraveling in superfluid. Ars Technica blog. November 15, 2019. Accessed July 5, 2026. Then the URL. IEEE’s Reference Guide now has a dedicated blog format — Author, “Title of the post,” Title of the Blog, Month Day, Year. [Online]. Available: URL — with the post title in sentence case: J. Ouellette, “Physicists capture first footage of quantum knots unraveling in superfluid,” Ars Technica, Nov. 15, 2019. [Online]. Available: URL.

The post was edited or deleted after you cited it. Blogs are the classic moving target. Capture the page in the Wayback Machine when you cite it, add an access date in MLA, and if the post later vanishes, cite the archived snapshot’s URL instead — the website guide covers the mechanics.

The principle underneath all of it: credit whoever wrote the post — real name or username, verbatim — put the post’s title in the article slot and the blog’s name in italics where a journal would go, date it to the day, and give the URL styled the way your format wants it. MLA sees a work on a website; APA sees an article in a serial; both are describing the same masthead.

Editorial methodology and sources