I Didn’t Set Out to Write a “Discover Article”

Most articles aren’t written to be discovered. They’re written to be found.

That difference sounds small, but it changes everything about how a piece of writing behaves once it leaves your site.

By Garrett Paquette · January 19, 2026

I wasn’t trying to reverse-engineer Google Discover. I wasn’t chasing traffic, keywords, or a new optimization trick. I was just noticing a pattern I couldn’t ignore.

The articles that quietly reached new people weren’t the most useful ones. They weren’t the most detailed. They weren’t even the most polished.

They were the ones that felt like they weren’t trying to teach anything at all.

At first, that felt backward.

Everything we’re taught about publishing says to be helpful. To explain clearly. To answer questions. To optimize for intent. To earn the click by promising resolution.

But Discover doesn’t show people what they’re looking for.

It shows them something they didn’t know they were interested in yet.

The moment that clicked for me was when I realized Discover doesn’t behave like search — it behaves like curiosity.

Search rewards completion. Discover rewards interruption.

That changes the job of the article.

A Discover-first article doesn’t exist to solve a problem. It exists to surface a thought — one that feels timely, human, and slightly unfinished.

What surprised me most was how little structure it actually needs.

Not more formatting. Not more sections. Not more optimization.

Less.

One idea. One observation. One experience that feels specific enough to be real, but open enough to belong to someone else too.

The articles that worked weren’t teaching frameworks. They were documenting moments.

Once I stopped trying to explain things, something else happened: the writing slowed down.

I stopped front-loading value. I stopped clarifying intent. I stopped telling readers what they were about to learn.

Instead, I let the article behave the way a thought does — emerging, circling, noticing, pausing.

That’s when the content started to feel discoverable.

A Discover-first article doesn’t announce itself as important.

It doesn’t say “here’s why this matters.”

It simply shows you why someone couldn’t stop thinking about it.

There’s a temptation, especially when you’re building tools or systems or platforms, to make every article do work. To justify itself. To point somewhere. To convert.

Discover resists that.

It favors writing that feels like it exists whether or not anyone clicks a link afterward.

That’s the quiet paradox: the less an article asks for attention, the more likely it is to receive it.

Not because it’s optimized — but because it feels human in a feed full of instructions.

I don’t think there’s a formula for this. And I don’t think there should be.

But I do know this: the moment you sit down to write a Discover-first article about being discovered, you stop writing a Discover-first article.

So the trick isn’t to aim at Discover.

It’s to write something that would make sense to encounter unexpectedly — and still feel worth the pause.