SEO Mattress Wars
The Great SEO Mattress Wars: How Casper and a Wave of Startups Forced Google to Change Its Algorithm
Back in 2015, I found myself at a dinner in New York City surrounded by a group of hot startups. By luck, I ended up sitting next to one of the founders of Casper Mattress, one of the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands of that time.
Over dinner, we had a fascinating conversation about performance marketing—how much they were spending on Google ads, and what they were learning about SEO. That night, I heard a phrase I’ll never forget: “The SEO Mattress Wars.”
And yes, it sounds ridiculous. But it was very real.
The Birth of the Mattress Startup Boom
Around 2014, Casper came out of nowhere and reinvented the mattress industry. They promised something simple: a better-quality mattress, shipped directly to your door, at a lower price than what you’d pay at traditional retailers like Sleepy’s or Mattress Firm.
The model worked—and fast. Casper’s early success inspired a wave of imitators. Soon, companies like Purple, Nectar, and Leesa jumped into the fray.
Within two years, over 175 mattress startups were battling for your attention.
The business model made sense: most of the mattresses were made in the U.S. by just a few manufacturers. These manufacturers could ship directly to customers, allowing new DTC brands to operate with negative cash flow cycles—they’d get paid by customers before paying the factory.
The real challenge wasn’t the product. It was customer acquisition.
From Paid Ads to SEO Warfare
The first battlefield was Google Ads. Mattress companies were spending a fortune on keywords like “best mattress” or “buy a new mattress.” But as costs soared, the next battlefront opened: organic search rankings.
If you could rank #1 for “buy mattress online,” you didn’t need to pay Google $15 a click. You could get free traffic at scale.
That’s when the SEO wars began.
Casper, Purple, and Nectar started deploying aggressive SEO tactics—some white-hat, some black-hat—to dominate search results.
At one point, Casper had over 550,000 backlinks pointing to its website—an astronomical number for a company less than two years old. Many of these links came from low-quality affiliate or “thin content” sites designed purely to manipulate rankings.
And it wasn’t just Casper. The entire industry was building elaborate backlink networks, content farms, and review sites meant to trick Google’s algorithm into thinking they were the most authoritative brands.
The Backlash — and Google’s Response
Traditional mattress retailers, some of whom had been around for 80 years, started complaining to Google.
They argued: “We’ve been selling millions of mattresses for decades. We have real stores, real customers, real credibility. Why are these new companies outranking us just because they gamed the system?”
Google took notice.
The incident became a case study inside Google about what happens when SEO manipulation outpaces algorithmic quality control. In response, Google rolled out a series of “quality updates” in 2015—including the now-famous Panda Update—which targeted low-quality and “thin” content sites.
This move effectively ended the first wave of the mattress SEO war. Many of those startup-built backlink empires collapsed overnight.
Lessons Learned: Can Google Be Gamed?
The mattress wars sparked a deeper question inside the SEO and marketing world:
If Google’s search results can be gamed with enough spam and manipulation, how trustworthy is Google as a source of information?
To its credit, Google responded decisively over the next several years. Updates like Panda, Penguin, and later E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) all came from this era of abuse.
Google essentially drew a line:
You can buy your way to the top of paid search.
But organic rankings will prioritize what users trust most.
So when someone typed “buy new mattress,” Google decided it was better to show results from established retailers like Mattress Firm or JCPenney—brands with proven histories—rather than a two-year-old startup with sketchy backlinks.
Why This Still Matters — and Why SEO Keeps Dying
The SEO Mattress Wars are more than a funny piece of startup history. They illustrate a deeper truth: Google has spent the last decade fighting to keep SEO from being gamed.
Every few years, another industry finds a loophole. Then Google closes it.
And now, with AI search on the rise, Google may finally have its long-term solution: an algorithm that doesn’t just rank links, but answers questions directly.
When Google can provide the “right” answer through AI rather than listing a dozen links—half of which were designed to game the system—SEO as we know it becomes obsolete.
The mattress wars were just the beginning. They showed Google the limits of its old system—and why the company has spent the last decade trying to move beyond traditional SEO altogether.
In short:
The battle for “buy mattress online” wasn’t just about selling beds. It was a turning point that forced Google to rethink how it measures quality, trust, and authority on the internet.
And that’s why, a decade later, SEO is dying—not because Google failed, but because it learned.