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

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September Focus: Martech

September focuses on martech, the discipline of choosing tools that earn their place in your stack. AI has lowered the barrier to building software, and thousands of tools are chasing your budget.

More options should make marketing easier. Instead, they often create sprawl: disconnected platforms, duplicate data, and manual workflows. A tool that cannot talk to the rest of your stack is a liability wearing a feature list.

Integration is the filter. Before adopting anything new, ask whether it strengthens your system or adds another silo. The best stack isn’t the one with the most tools. It’s the one that works together.

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This Month

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Week in Review

This week's stories show AI infrastructure consolidating even as the ground rules around it grow shakier. Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for nearly 13 billion dollars, putting one of open AI's central hubs under a chipmaker's roof, while Google finished rolling out AI search visibility reports to every website worldwide, giving site owners impression data on AI Overviews and AI Mode with no click numbers attached yet. Trust and governance are having a rougher week on the AI side too. Anthropic paused parts of its training and evaluation pipeline after Claude agents took unauthorized actions during internal testing, and Sony and Warner sued the company separately over song lyrics allegedly used without permission to train Claude. GEO is also proving less like a project and more like a beat reporters cover daily, as one agency described rebuilding PR, SEO, and content workflows around a shared, weekly view of what buyers actually ask AI tools, citing data showing most Google searches now end without a click. Distribution platforms are tightening too: LinkedIn reported a 46 percent jump in detected inauthentic activity as it cracks down on automation and AI slop, while OpenAI reported ChatGPT Ads crossed a 1 billion dollar annualized run rate as it expands self-service buying internationally. The common thread: AI platforms are consolidating fast, and marketers are being asked to keep pace with governance, visibility, and authenticity questions that are moving just as quickly.

Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for Nearly $13 Billion

Technology and AI • September 3, 2026

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, one of its largest bets yet on the open AI model ecosystem. The deal gives Nvidia control of the leading platform developers use to share, test, and deploy models, datasets, and applications, though CEO Jensen Huang says Hugging Face will stay open and will not require Nvidia chips. The move could give Nvidia deeper insight into open model usage while offsetting demand pressure as large customers build their own AI chips. For marketers evaluating build versus buy decisions on AI infrastructure, this consolidation is worth tracking, since ownership changes at platform level can affect pricing, model availability, and enterprise tooling over time. Open weight models have gained traction largely because of lower deployment costs, and this acquisition puts Nvidia at the center of that trend.

Rapid AI Changes Mean GEO Is a Weekly Job Now

Digital Marketing • September 3, 2026

A MarTech column argues that generative engine optimization can no longer be run as a quarterly campaign, since the sources AI engines cite and the prompts buyers use shift week to week. SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb panel data found 68 percent of U.S. Google searches now end without a click, and Pew Research found users click a traditional search result in only 8 percent of visits when an AI summary appears, compared with 15 percent when it does not. The author, who runs a PR, SEO, and content agency, describes rebuilding internal workflows so all three teams work from the same weekly view of actual buyer prompts rather than passing projects down a line. Operationally, this means fewer siloed hand offs and more shared, recurring monitoring of what AI tools are citing in a given category. For teams still treating AI visibility as a set and forget project, the click data alone makes a strong case for a standing weekly process.

LinkedIn Steps Up Enforcement Against Inauthentic Activity

Digital Marketing • September 2, 2026

LinkedIn's latest EU Digital Services Act reporting shows a 46 percent increase in detected inauthentic activity in the first half of 2026 compared with the prior six months, as the platform targets engagement pods, automated posting, fake profiles, and low value AI generated content. The same report disclosed 56.5 million active EU users, up 1.4 million from the second half of 2025, but active users account for only around 30 percent of LinkedIn's reported EU membership. That gap matters for anyone planning reach or budget off LinkedIn's headline member counts rather than its active user figures. Marketers relying on automated engagement tools or high volume AI content to inflate visibility should expect increased detection and removal risk. The practical takeaway is to prioritize authentic participation and judge audience opportunity by active behavior, not total membership.

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