A Dubai business owner told me his site "used to be on Google's first page" — past tense, said like the weather changed.

It didn't change by itself. A competitor fixed their page titles. Another one made their site faster. Google noticed, quietly, the way it always does.

Rankings aren't weather. They're a scoreboard of boring maintenance nobody applauds: titles that say what you do, pages that load fast, links that don't break. The businesses that treat it like brushing teeth — small, regular, unglamorous — are the ones that stop talking about Google in the past tense.