Rodrigo Diniz, Digital Marketing Specialist and Founder

Rodrigo Diniz is the founder of Nekko Digital and the architect of its search strategy practice. He launched the agency in 2012 and has built it into a search-first practice with a focus on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — helping brands compete to be cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.

His work focuses on the intersection of traditional SEO and AI-driven search: how brands earn citations from ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, while simultaneously holding ground in Google’s traditional and AI-Overview results. He leads Nekko’s most technically demanding engagements — from large-scale topical authority builds to recoveries of penalized domains — and is responsible for the agency’s GEO methodology.

On the paid side, LinkedIn comes first for Hawaii businesses that sell to other businesses and professionals. Before anything is planned, Rodrigo acts as a LinkedIn ads consultant, looking at who buys from the business and recommending whether LinkedIn, Meta or Google Ads should lead.

Rodrigo’s path into digital marketing started early — as a teenage web specialist building websites and managing web servers — and grew into more than two decades in IT and a digital marketing specialization he has practiced since 2012. The years in IT support and infrastructure roles across Hawaii gave him the technical foundation that informs how he approaches site architecture, structured data, and crawlability today. He holds an MBA with a Finance concentration from Hawaii Pacific University, a Digital Marketing specialization from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and an SEO specialization from UC Davis — along with Google Cybersecurity Professional and Semrush AI Visibility certifications.

Rodrigo writes about AI search optimization, technical SEO strategy, and the operational realities of running a distributed agency from Hawaii. His perspective: SEO is no longer a channel — it’s a system that has to work across human readers, search algorithms, and large language models simultaneously, or it doesn’t work at all.