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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🧭 Start here

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          📚 Book Summaries

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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 highlight AI search becoming both a traffic source and an ad channel, with Google testing ads in AI Mode for Personal Intelligence users while moving inline links higher and expanding Preferred Sources carousels. Measurement remains a concern as ChatGPT appears to have dropped UTM parameters, pushing AI referrals into direct traffic, while Bing's Topics Portfolio offers a new view of AI citations without click data. Ahrefs data showing ChatGPT favoring primary sources over summaries reinforces the value of original research, and Google's expanded publisher licensing program raises questions about who earns visibility in AI answers. On the commerce and model side, Amex proposed safeguards for agent-made purchases and Meta released its first frontier model, Muse Wonder. Across these developments, marketers face a familiar challenge: adopt new AI channels without losing sight of attribution, trust, and control.

            Google Begins Testing Ads in AI Mode for Users With Personal Intelligence Enabled

            Digital Marketing •  October 16, 2026

            Google has started testing ads in AI Mode for users who opt into Personal Intelligence, reversing the ad-free approach the experience launched with. Insights from connected apps may now help personalize which ads appear, alongside the query, the context of the AI response, and the user's interests. Google says ads will not be based directly on Gmail or Google Photos content, advertisers cannot access connected apps, sensitive information is excluded, and users can disconnect apps at any time. Google also updated its privacy policy to cover connected-app data in ad personalization. No new advertiser controls, targeting options, or wider rollout have been announced. Treat this as an early signal that AI Mode is becoming a paid placement, and watch for changes in Google Ads reporting and eligibility.

            Google Puts Inline Links Higher in More AI Search Responses

            Marketing and SEO •  October 15, 2026

            Google announced five changes to how AI Mode and AI Overviews link to sources. Inline links will appear more often and higher in responses, though Google gave no figures for the increase. Google will test a section at the top of task-focused answers that points to official sites, and related-article links at the end of responses are getting image thumbnails. Carousels of timely articles that highlight a user's Preferred Sources are expanding to more locations and languages, and Google says Preferred Sources usage is now more than seven times its level at the start of the year. Search Console assigns every link within an AI Overview a single position, so a higher inline link will not necessarily change reported position. Check AI Search results directly in the markets you serve, and confirm your site is eligible for Search generative AI features in Search Console to qualify as a Preferred Source.

            ChatGPT Appears to Drop UTM Tracking, Making AI Referral Traffic Harder to Measure

            Marketing and SEO •  October 15, 2026

            OpenAI appears to have removed the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter from ChatGPT links, which may be pushing visits into analytics as direct traffic. Adobe's Cedric Huesler reported that links now seem to open in a way that suppresses referrer data. His review of about 500 pages that previously drew at least 5% of visits from ChatGPT compared October 9 to 13 with the prior week. ChatGPT traffic fell by roughly 31,000 visits per day while direct traffic rose by roughly 26,000 per day, and two-thirds of the pages losing ChatGPT referrals saw direct traffic increase. OpenAI has not confirmed the change was intentional, and the analysis does not prove every missing referral has the same cause. Review referral, direct, and landing page trends together before concluding that ChatGPT visibility has dropped.

            View the full weekly digital marketing news digest →