
Founder and CEO of Nico Digital, an India-based SEO, AEO and performance marketing agency. 175+ active clients, 327+ campaigns, delivery across India, US, UK, EU and APAC. Writing on SEO strategy, AI search and the economics of organic growth.
Aditya Kathotia is the Founder and CEO of Nico Digital. The agency runs SEO, AEO, AI search, content, link building, digital PR and Reddit-as-a-source citation programmes for 175+ active clients across India, the US, the UK, EU and APAC. He works most closely with D2C, B2B SaaS, fintech, healthcare and enterprise brands, and is the author of 80+ articles on this site covering AI search visibility, SEO strategy, content economics and digital marketing in India.
Quick stats that describe how Aditya works and what he and the Nico Digital team have shipped.
Active clients across India, US, UK, EU and APAC
Campaigns shipped across SEO, AEO and performance
Original articles authored on the Nico Digital blog
Years running organic and AI search programmes
The disciplines Aditya works on personally and writes on most often.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity citation engineering, AI Overview optimisation, llms.txt, IndexNow.
Programme design, technical foundations, schema graphs, IA, multi-region SEO.
Three-pillar AEO + LLM citation + AI Overview defence retainer.
Editorial pickups in tier-1 publishers, integrated with SEO and AEO measurement.
Citation engineering across the source types LLM training data over-weights.
Original-research content, programmatic content at quality, content cluster engineering.
A selection of recent articles. Aditya writes every post on the Nico Digital blog personally - full archive linked below.
Most AI Overview advice is a list of tips that assumes every page fails for the same reason. It does not. A page can miss the citation at five separate points - the query never triggers an Overview, your URL never enters the candidate pool, your page has no liftable passage, the synthesised answer does not need your claim, or the link lands on the wrong URL. Each failure looks identical from the outside and each needs a different fix. This is the diagnostic we run to find which gate a page is failing before writing a single word.
Our monthly client report used to run past twenty pages. Almost none of it changed a decision. So we deleted nine metrics - average keyword position, impressions, Domain Authority, bounce rate, headline sessions, backlinks acquired, time on page, crawl stats and the activity log - and rebuilt the report around three layers instead. This is what each metric was actually doing, why it had to go, what replaced it, and how to run the same cut on your own reporting without losing the client's trust.
We hand-picked 30 journalists and pitched them five different kinds of story angle - original data, contrarian correction, timely commentary, expert-source offer, and client announcement - then tracked every reply and every placement. The data angle pulled a 67% reply rate. The announcement angle pulled zero. This is the full experiment: the method, the angle-by-angle results, what correlated with replies beyond the angle itself, the pitch anatomy that worked, and the 30-day version you can run yourself.
Every Amazon agency in India sells you the same promise: we will bring your ACOS down. That promise is close to worthless, and we can prove it with arithmetic - there is a version of every account where ACOS improves, TACOS improves, and the business makes less money. This is the buyer-side guide the category does not have: why splitting listings and ads across two vendors breaks the flywheel, the retail-readiness gate that makes ad budgets pointless, the five fee models and what each one quietly optimises for, and the twelve questions to ask a shortlist along with the answer that should end the conversation.
We pulled the July 2026 India search data for architecture, construction and interiors and found something odd: 74,000 monthly searches for 'interior designers near me' at a keyword difficulty of 5, and 6,600 for 'construction company in bangalore' at a difficulty of 1. The demand is enormous and almost nobody is competing for it properly. This is the full playbook - the four AEC buyer journeys, the page architecture that ranks, the portfolio-crawlability problem that quietly kills most firm websites, the calculator play that captures 12,100 searches a month, and how AI assistants are already recommending firms in this category.
Every PPC vs SEO cost comparison on the internet is priced in dollars. This one is priced in rupees, with the full invoice for both channels, cost per lead by industry, and a 24-month model showing exactly which month organic overtakes paid - and why the honest crossover is five months later than most agencies claim.
Ask three agencies to quote an SEO audit and you will get ₹4,999, ₹45,000, and ₹2.5L - all three called an SEO audit. This guide explains what each price band actually buys in India in 2026, reverse-engineers any quote into the hours behind it, prices the AI-search layer most proposals still leave out, tells you honestly what a free audit is worth, and gives you a five-step method to set your own budget.
Surat cuts most of the world's diamonds and weaves most of India's man-made fabric - and its digital marketing agencies are built around that economy: social-first, creative-heavy, priced low, and mostly silent on AI search. This 2026 map shows you how to evaluate them, names the agencies worth a look, explains what each is genuinely good at, and tells you which channels actually matter for your kind of Surat business.
Selected coverage and appearances. Full press list is maintained on the press page.
Entrepreneur, Economic Times, HubSpot, Business.com, Clutch, and a rotating list of trade publications across SEO, AI search, ecommerce and B2B SaaS marketing.
See full press list →Roughly one external appearance per month, focused on AI search, AEO measurement and the unit economics of running an SEO programme in 2026. Booking enquiries via aditya@nicodigital.com.
Aditya Kathotia is the Founder and CEO of Nico Digital, an India-based SEO, AEO and performance marketing agency that works with 175+ active clients across India, the US, the UK, EU and APAC. He has spent more than a decade running organic search and AI-search programmes for D2C, B2B SaaS, fintech, healthcare and enterprise brands, and writes regularly on SEO strategy, AI search and the changing economics of organic acquisition.
Aditya's strongest areas are AI search visibility (AEO + GEO), enterprise SEO programme architecture, integrated digital PR and Reddit citation engineering, and content strategy for high-authority publishing. His engagements typically combine technical SEO, content production, link building and AI-search measurement into a single retainer with named senior ownership.
Nico Digital is headquartered in Kolkata, on Park Street at the Chatterjee International Center, with a sales and marketing office in Andheri (E), Mumbai. Delivery is global - clients in India, US, UK, EU and APAC. The team is fully in-house, no white-labelled execution.
The fastest path is the contact form on this site, which routes to Aditya at aditya@nicodigital.com and the team at info@nicodigital.com. He responds personally to inbound from prospective clients within one business day. For media, podcast or speaking enquiries, the same address works - please mention the publication or event in the subject line.
Yes. His commentary and Nico Digital's work have been referenced in Entrepreneur, Economic Times, HubSpot, Business.com, Clutch and other industry publications. Recent appearances and a running press list are maintained on the press page on this site.
Yes. Every post on the Nico Digital blog - currently 80+ articles spanning SEO, AEO, AI search, content marketing and performance marketing - is authored by Aditya. Editorial decisions, original analysis, and the position the agency takes on industry shifts (AI Overviews, the no-100-results-per-page rule, ChatGPT's Bing reliance, the Reddit-OpenAI deal) are all written from his desk.
AI is reshaping SEO, not killing it. The signals that decide which sources Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite - authority, content depth, schema clarity, editorial corroboration - are largely the same signals that earn top-10 organic rankings. Brands that win AI search are almost always brands that already rank well organically. The shift is in measurement and surface, not discipline. He has written about this in detail in is-seo-dead-in-2026 and the AI search gap analysis.
Yes - selectively. He focuses on appearances that go deep on AI search, AEO measurement, and the unit economics of running an SEO programme in 2026 (rather than generic best-practice talks). Podcast and event enquiries: aditya@nicodigital.com with the subject line and audience profile. Calendar windows are limited; he tries to do roughly one external appearance per month.
Inbound from prospective clients gets a personal reply within one business day. Brief us on what you are working on and where you are stuck.