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 →
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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.
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.
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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Week in Review
This week's stories show measurement and discovery both drifting further from anything a marketer can take at face value. Google detailed Qualified Future Conversions, a metric that will credit a click with a sale up to 180 days later once a weak seven-day signal fires, and pushed its Meridian GeoX testing tool to general availability worldwide, backing both moves with efficiency claims the company declined to substantiate with methodology or sample size. Independent research is filling some of that gap on its own terms: a University of Washington paper found AI Overviews cut search referrals to Wikipedia by about 5 percent, and Razorfish's Agentic Divide study found 94 percent of US AI users would consider a brand they had never heard of on an AI assistant's recommendation, even as trust in those recommendations still trails search results and brand sites outright. Product discovery is moving just as fast underneath eCommerce brands specifically, with Profound's tracking showing ChatGPT Shopping's reliance on merchant product feeds jumping from 8 percent to 62 percent of picks in a single day after a model update, a shift that quietly cost hundreds of tracked retailers a third of their visibility overnight. Platform stability had its own rough week: Automattic's board briefly forced WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg onto leave before reversing course within 48 hours, a reminder that the company behind widely used publishing infrastructure is not immune to its own governance drama. Google Ads and MarketingProfs's broader AI roundup rounded out a week that was less about new capability and more about who controls the rules those capabilities run on, from Amazon's new ChatGPT advertising access to bipartisan calls for AI safety legislation. The common thread: the tools marketers depend on for attribution, discovery, and distribution are being rebuilt in real time, and the vendors building them are asking for trust well ahead of the evidence.
New Study Finds AI Overviews Cut Search Referrals to Wikipedia by About 5%
Marketing and SEO • September 11, 2026
A University of Washington working paper, updated September 2 and covered by Search Engine Journal on September 11, estimates that Google's AI Overviews reduced monthly search referrals to English Wikipedia by roughly 5 percent since the feature became the default US experience in 2024. Researchers compared referral trends for English Wikipedia against German and French editions, which lack default AI Overviews, using a matched sample of nearly one million article pairs, and the difference translates to about 100 million fewer monthly referrals, or roughly 1.2 billion annually. Google disputes whether the referral metric can be isolated to its feature specifically, and the estimate is notably smaller than the authors' original figure published in February. For marketers, the study adds independent data to the zero-click search debate and reinforces that publishers relying on informational search traffic should diversify distribution and track referral trends by content type rather than assume stable organic volume, treating any single traffic-loss estimate as directional rather than definitive.
MarketingProfs Rounds Up a Turbulent Week of AI Marketing and Policy News
Technology and AI • September 11, 2026
MarketingProfs' September 11 AI Update compiles more than two dozen developments from the prior week, spanning commerce, product launches, and AI governance. Highlights include Amazon opening ChatGPT advertising access to select US brands through a new OpenAI partnership, Google testing exact and phrase match Search ads inside AI Mode, and independent data showing Google's AI Mode displays different products, sellers, and prices than its standard Shopping carousel in nearly 99 percent of matched searches, with average AI Mode prices running 21.6 percent higher. The roundup also tracks a sharpening AI safety debate, including a former Anthropic researcher's resignation over model-control concerns and bipartisan Senate interest in new legislation. For marketers, the combined signal is that conversational and AI-native surfaces are becoming distinct advertising and discovery channels with their own pricing, product visibility, and regulatory exposure, all of which deserve separate monitoring from traditional search and retail media performance.
Automattic Board Briefly Ousts WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg as CEO
Digital Marketing • September 9, 2026
Automattic's board voted on September 9 to place founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence against his wishes, naming CFO Mark Davies interim CEO; Mullenweg said the board had conspired against him and gave him roughly 50 minutes' notice before the vote. He announced he had regained control less than 48 hours later, and within days Automattic confirmed his reinstatement while several board members and its chief legal officer departed the company. Automattic runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, and other properties and remains in ongoing litigation with hosting provider WP Engine, a dispute that has already strained parts of the WordPress community. For marketers and site owners who depend on WordPress, the episode is a reminder to watch the stability of the parent organization behind widely used publishing infrastructure, since leadership disputes at this level can affect roadmap priorities, plugin ecosystem support, and hosting relationships even when day-to-day site functionality is unaffected.