Malte Landwehr on why a competitor's 1,100% SEO jump did not last
A cautionary tale from 2021 that the former SEO lead now sees repeating in AI Search.
Malte Landwehr, writing on LinkedIn on 11 September 2026, described a competitor that grew 1,100% overnight after the June 2021 Google core update. His own site, 15 times larger at the time, was unaffected by the update. The competitor's surge cut that lead down to 20%, according to Landwehr's post.
Landwehr's team had deliberately kept most of their millions of URLs out of Google's index. The competitor was running a far more aggressive indexing strategy with a smaller team and budget. Stakeholders inside Landwehr's company questioned the restrained approach in meeting after meeting.
Both sites stayed flat for 12 months. Then Landwehr's visibility grew 75% and the competitor began to decline. Today, he writes, his former site is eight times larger than it was then and the competitor's visibility has fallen to almost zero.
The pattern Landwehr sees repeating in GEO
Landwehr draws the parallel to GEO directly. Some practitioners are recommending aggressive, high-risk tactics and can point to strong short-term results. He warns that early wins do not tell you whether a tactic will keep working once engines adapt.
Lily Ray made a similar point on the podcast You are what you EEAT, saying that anyone trying such tactics should do so on an extremely small scale because engines will get better at demoting them.
What to do with this before copying a tactic you saw work
We think the useful move here is to separate two things your stakeholders will conflate. One is a competitor's current chart. The other is whether the mechanism producing that chart survives the next model update or algorithm change.
Before adopting a tactic that is working for someone else, run it on a small slice of your own inventory and measure it against a holdout. Track citations and retrieval over months rather than weeks. Ask what would have to remain true about the retriever, the ranker or the index for the gain to persist.
And prepare the internal conversation. Landwehr's point is that a durable strategy can look wrong for a year while an aggressive one looks right. Educating stakeholders on the difference between evidence, noise and risk is part of the work.