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.
July Focus: Social Media
July focuses on social media, the discipline of building relationships at scale on platforms you do not own. Success is not just about posting content. It comes from showing up consistently, joining conversations, engaging with your community, and creating content people find valuable enough to share.
Every social platform is rented land. Algorithms change and audiences can disappear overnight. Use social media to earn attention and build trust, but always guide people back to assets you own, like your website and email list.
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 news made AI search feel less like a feature and more like infrastructure. The EU ordered Google to open Android and search data to AI rivals, while Germany ruled that AI Overviews fall under media law, signaling that AI-generated search experiences are now subject to regulation. At the same time, publisher ad supply continued shrinking as zero-click search reduced referral traffic, even as ChatGPT-referred phone calls converted to leads at a remarkable 49 percent. Two other developments stood out: Databricks showed that cheaper AI tokens don't necessarily mean lower costs, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella warned that every prompt correction helps train the model behind it. The takeaway isn't that AI search is replacing traditional search, but that it's becoming regulated, measurable infrastructure marketers need to understand, monitor, and optimize.
China's Kimi K3 Erases Assumptions About the US AI Lead
AI & Martech • July 17, 2026
Beijing based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model it says is the largest open-weight system yet announced, and in blind testing by evaluator Arena the model beat Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol on front-end coding while outranking Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on broader text tasks, at roughly 40 percent lower cost. Moonshot plans to publish the full model weights on July 27, letting any organization download and run the model on its own infrastructure rather than through a hosted API. The release undercuts the assumption that Chinese labs trail the U.S. frontier by months and could pressure how American vendors price and package their own tools. For marketers evaluating AI vendors for content, coding, or agentic workflows, it is a reminder that the competitive set is widening quickly and that open-weight options are becoming credible alternatives to proprietary platforms, even as governance, data residency, and security questions remain unresolved.
EU Forces Google to Open Search Data and Android Features to AI Rivals
SEO & Compliance • July 16, 2026
The European Commission issued detailed Digital Markets Act requirements ordering Google to open 11 Android features to competing AI assistants and to share anonymized search data with rival AI chatbots and search engines, with data-sharing rules taking effect from January 2027 and Android changes following by July 2027. Google can screen rivals for security and privacy compliance before granting access, and a formula will set the price of the shared data, but the company still called the ruling a risk to user privacy and security. For marketers, this is the clearest regulatory move yet aimed at diversifying the AI search landscape in Europe, meaning brands may need to optimize for a wider set of AI assistants and search engines rather than assuming Google and Gemini will remain the default discovery layer. It also signals that EU regulators intend to keep treating AI search as a competition issue, not just a product feature.
Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic Converge on Frontier AI Rules
AI & Regulatory • July 16, 2026
Within a five week span, the CEOs of Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic each published detailed proposals for regulating frontier AI models, and despite differing structures, all three agreed that the most capable models should face independent testing before release, that a single body should certify compliance, and that the U.S. should lead any oversight regime rather than a patchwork of state or international rules. The convergence follows two rounds of improvised government intervention this summer that restricted access to Anthropic's and OpenAI's newest models over cyber risk concerns. Critics note that formal certification requirements could favor incumbents with the legal and technical resources to comply, potentially raising barriers for startups and open-source developers. Marketers relying on frontier AI tools for content, analytics, or automation should expect more formal testing and possible release delays ahead, along with vendor selection criteria that increasingly factor in compliance posture.