Digital Marketing, SEO, Analytics, and Software Reviews

With 25+ years in digital marketing, Marketing With Dave focuses on discovering, measuring, and optimizing every aspect of it.

Marketing Tools Spotlight

My current top picks from everything I’ve been reviewing and testing.🔥 On My Radar → and view all reviews and comparisons →

Comparison chart of social media management software showing costs over three years, highlighting SocialBu's affordable lifetime deal and other options like Buffer and Hootsuite.
After years of searching, I found my long-term solution. I use SocialBu every day.
TidyCal scheduling software interface showing calendar, booking options, and features like unlimited bookings and integrations, promoting easy calendar management.
Book meetings and accept payments for $29 lifetime, with no monthly subscription.
Compare four lifetime deals and find the AI Search Visibility tool that best fits your needs.
Latest Analysis and Articles
LinkedIn profile optimization tips from Marketing with Dave, including how to fix, get trusted, and contact for career success.
Your LinkedIn Profile Mastered

Get found. Build trust. Create opportunities.
Available in Kindle (ebook), paperback, and audiobook formats.
Learn how to improve your LinkedIn profile in about an hour with 17 practical improvements based on a real job search after 25+ years in digital marketing.
Step-by-step guidance to help you make the right changes the first time and build a profile that attracts recruiters, strengthens your personal brand, and creates new opportunities.

October Focus: Content Marketing

October focuses on content marketing: creating something worth someone’s attention.

We talk about audiences, traffic, followers, and reach. But every piece of content is read by one person at a time. Start there.

Good content answers a question, solves a problem, teaches something useful, or gives someone a reason to think differently. It is created for people first, not for algorithms, search engines, or publishing calendars.

And it keeps working. One useful article can rank in search, surface in an AI answer, fuel your social posts, anchor an email campaign, and help a future customer decide. The goal is not more content. It is content worth finding, worth reading, and worth remembering.

If you missed past content or want to revisit a topic, check out the Content Calendar. Explore the insights below, and please share your thoughts.

This Month

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            Marketing with Dave: Marketing book summaries with 30+ book breakdowns and practical takeaways, featuring top marketing books for digital marketing success.

            Week in Review

            This week's stories center on AI agents taking over more of the buying and selling workflow, with Shopify opening eligible store checkouts to browser agents, Meta extending its Muse agent to small businesses, and Amazon merging its ad console and DSP into one agent-led platform that makes AI-based campaign setup the default. Platform control is tightening at the same time, as Apple's iOS 27 blocklist stopped The Trade Desk from serving ads in Safari and Reddit announced it will end RSS feeds on November 13 and its public API in March 2027, leaving ad delivery, social listening, and AI data access more dependent on a few gatekeepers. Measurement guidance rounds out the week, with new research on time to first citation, evidence that AI referral traffic is undercounted in analytics, and a six-part B2B audit framework, all of which reward marketers who tie every metric to a decision and keep first-party data clean.

            What's the AI KPI That Most Marketers Aren't Tracking Yet?

            Marketing and SEO • October 1, 2026

            Content Marketing Institute recaps a MasterTHIS webinar in which Amanda Natividad of SparkToro and Erik Carlson of Notified argue that the old marketing scoreboard no longer fits AI answer engines. Their proposed new metric is time to first citation. Notified's research partner Profound found it takes about six days on average for an LLM to index and cite a typical piece of content, while press releases earn a first citation in roughly eight hours. Traffic is the metric losing value: SparkToro research cited in the piece found 68% of US Google searches ended without a click, and only 232 of every 1,000 searches reached the open web, down from 360 less than two years ago. The speakers recommend shifting dashboards toward reach, audience, demand, and business outcomes. For operators, that means tracking citation speed and using distribution channels that LLMs pick up quickly, which shortens the window in which inaccurate information about a brand can circulate.

            7 AI Search Myths Busted by Data

            Marketing and SEO • October 1, 2026

            Rob Tindula of NP Digital checks seven popular claims about AI and search against published data. The State of Search Q2 2026 report found AI search and traditional search growing at about the same rate quarter over quarter, even as clicks to non-Google-owned desktop results fell to their lowest level since April 2025. On llms.txt, Google says it does not use the file for AI search discovery, and a 90-day study of 10 sites found most saw no measurable change in AI crawl frequency or AI-referred traffic. Profound's research indicates emerging AI search providers do not render JavaScript, so server-side rendering matters for AI visibility. A separate Profound study found only about 2.5% of downstream visits after an AI mention carried a trackable AI referral parameter, which means your analytics AI referral segment is a floor, not a ceiling. Tindula discloses that he works at NP Digital, whose study supports his argument that AI will not fully replace SEO teams.

            Reddit Is Killing RSS Feeds and Ending Public API Access Because of AI Bots

            Digital Marketing • September 30, 2026

            Reddit announced it will end RSS feed support on November 13 and shut down its public API in March 2027, citing large-scale scraping and automated abuse. The API change will affect tools that rely on programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, research tools, and AI assistants, and AI products will need commercial agreements with Reddit to keep using its data. Approved third-party apps and bots must register before January 12, 2027 or lose API access. Reddit said its non-advertising revenue grew 24% year over year to $43 million in the second quarter, driven by AI licensing, which explains its reluctance to give data away for free. Marketers should audit any monitoring, alerting, or research workflow that depends on Reddit RSS or the public API before those dates.

            View the full weekly digital marketing news digest →