Rodrigo Diniz.

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) — engineering brand visibility in 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.

Rodrigo's path into digital marketing started early — building websites and managing web servers as a teenager — and grew into more than two decades in IT and 15+ years specializing in digital marketing. 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 Apple, CompTIA, 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.