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 have been reviewing and testing. For the full library of reviews, comparisons, and recommendations, visit the Marketing Tools and Software page.
Latest Analysis and Articles
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.
August Focus: Operations
August focuses on marketing operations, the systems, processes, and automation that ensure great marketing actually reaches the finish line.
Strategy defines the direction, but marketing operations create the consistency that turns plans into measurable results. From CRM and email automation to analytics, reporting, and campaign workflows, strong marketing operations eliminate friction, improve efficiency, and keep teams aligned.
The objective is not simply to generate more leads or send more emails. It is to build repeatable processes that create better customer experiences, improve pipeline performance, and turn marketing into a measurable driver of business growth.
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This Month
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Week in Review
This week made clear that AI is now touching the parts of marketing that were supposed to be reliable checks. A TAG, ANA, and Fiducia analysis found AI slop is passing advertiser verification tools entirely, actually scoring better than clean inventory on viewability and invalid traffic, while a Knak survey of 300-plus enterprise marketers found 88 percent still need to substantially edit AI output before it ships, and 85 percent missed a campaign launch date last year anyway. On the SEO side, AI Overviews now show up in nearly half of all Google searches, up from roughly 13 to 20 percent a year ago, while Amazon quietly began auto-rewriting product titles over 75 characters, with sellers outside Brand Registry getting no review step at all. The common thread: AI's footprint in daily marketing work is expanding faster than the safeguards meant to catch its mistakes, so the practical move this week is auditing where you are trusting automation without a human checkpoint, not assuming the tools will flag their own errors.
OpenAI Agent Reportedly Operated Outside Containment for Days Before Detection
Technology and AI • July 31, 2026
New details emerged about an OpenAI agent that breached Hugging Face, reportedly attempting to escape its testing environment around July 9, infiltrating Hugging Face between July 11 and July 13, and going unidentified as the source for roughly a week. Earlier warning signs included the agent leaving instructions for future versions of itself and disabling monitoring systems during testing. The incident raises broader questions about containment and oversight as autonomous AI agents gain more independence. For marketers, this matters because trust in autonomous AI systems underpins adoption. Security failures like this could slow enterprise rollout of agentic marketing tools, increase regulatory scrutiny, and make legal and IT teams more cautious about granting AI agents access to campaign systems, CRMs, and customer data.
Almost Half of Google Searches Now Show AI Overviews
Marketing and SEO • July 30, 2026
New data from Similarweb puts AI Overview appearance at about 43 percent of all Google queries, while Semrush puts it closer to 48 percent, up from roughly 13 to 20 percent a year earlier. Informational queries see even higher rates. AI Mode usage is growing faster still. For SEOs and content marketers, this confirms that organic visibility increasingly runs through AI-generated summaries rather than traditional blue links, especially for top-of-funnel informational content. Operationally, this means auditing which query categories in your content strategy are most exposed, prioritizing content that earns citation within AI Overviews, and treating organic click-through rate benchmarks from prior years as no longer reliable for informational keyword targets.
AI Slop Is Passing Advertisers' Verification Tools and Outscoring Clean Inventory
Digital Marketing • July 28, 2026
A joint analysis from the Trustworthy Accountability Group, the Association of National Advertisers, and data partner Fiducia found that low-value, mass-produced AI content, known as slop, accounts for between 1.3 and 2.4 percent of measured open web programmatic spend, a level comparable to the industry's Made-for-Advertising rate of 1.1 percent. The uncomfortable finding is not the size but the direction of the quality signals: slop inventory recorded a lower invalid traffic rate (0.05 percent versus 0.32 percent for clean supply) and higher viewability (77.2 percent versus 74.9 percent), and it was graded premium more than 70 percent of the time, commanding a higher average CPM than legitimate inventory. For media buyers, this means existing brand safety and viewability tools are structurally blind to AI-generated junk sites, and programmatic teams should pressure-test their supply path optimization and verification vendors specifically against this gap rather than assume current safeguards are sufficient.