On a site with a custom post type news and a custom taxonomy topic, both with matching rewrite slugs, I’m trying to understand and control WordPress’s rewrite replacement priority for changing a raw query string into a permalink.

These two urls point to the same post_type archive:

• /news/?topic=food (post_type-first, preferred)
• /topic/food?post_type=news (taxonomy-first)

What’s confusing, and what I’d like to enforce, is that a plain request to ?post_type=news&topic=food gets rewritten taxonomy-first instead of the post_type-first. /news/?topic=food should be canonical.

How can I reverse that priority so the raw query string rewrites and redirects to the post_type-first url?