discover.aigc: what are these URLs that showed up in Google Discover?

Since mid-July 2026 we have been seeing Google Discover cards pointing to discover.aigc. The URLs all share the same shape:

https://discover.aigc/?id=5691595089221165251
https://discover.aigc/?id=13141930252401357277

A numeric id, no path, no readable slug.
Funfact: The domain resolves to nothing. .aigc TLD is not even delegated.

The related cards however do carry real headlines and content from real publishers. The cards show a media, a proper image an headline, yet tapping it errors.
Here is what ranked in the top 10 on 25 July 2026, in terms of share of voice.

English

French

When it started

The first discover.aigc URLs entered our index on 16 July 2026. From our main languages: 22 July in French, 23 July in English.

How big it got

Share of voice of discover.aigc among Discover articles, by day:

Three days took it from near zero to almost 3% of English Discover share of voice (visibility %). French follows the same curve one day behind, at roughly a third of the level. The 26 July figures cover part of the day only, and both were still climbing when we measured.

It is not limited to English and French. On 25 July, Japanese was in fact higher than English at 4.68 %, with Korean at 1.51 % and Spanish at 0.24 %. On 26 July, Japanese held at 4.71 % and Korean kept rising to 2.27 %.

This is a significant part of the impressions sent to a black hole.

What we are saying about it

Nothing yet, beyond what is above. We are documenting what we see, day by day, and we may publish more once the picture is clearer.

If you have been searching for discover.aigc or https://discover.aigc because you saw one of these URLs on your phone, you are not the only one.

Follow this

We are tracking it daily across every language we cover.

• Subscribe to our Substack for regular insights into Google Discover: 1492dotvision.substack.com
• We also publish a French edition: 1492vision.substack.com
• Follow us on X: @1492_Vision

First version: 26 July 2026.

Update, 28 July 2026: discover.aigc has stopped growing

Since we first published this page, discover.aigc has levelled off. It is still there, at the same level, in every language we cover.

Share of voice among Discover articles, full days:

English has settled between 3.5 % and 3.7 %, French between 1.2 % and 1.3 %. The rise has stopped, the level has not come down.

The 26 July figures in the original version of this page (3.55 % English, 1.42 % French) were measured mid-day. The complete day came in slightly lower, at 3.46 % and 1.33 %, and those are the numbers above.

Japanese remains the highest of every language we track, above English on each day since 25 July: 4.68 %, then 4.91 %, then 4.34 % on 27 July. Korean has settled around 2.2 %, Spanish around 0.4 %.

28 July is still in progress as we write this.

What it looks like on a phone. On the left, a discover.aigc card in the feed, between cards from ordinary publishers. Sometimes, these cards do show a real publisher icon and name. The image is a real publisher image. The title however was rewritten, likely by AI: it's not the publisher one.

Here, we have a different case: no publisher, the media "is" discover.aigc Funny thing in that case: that fake publisher gets its google search profile like any other one :)

On the right, the publisher profile Google generates for it: no post however.

We are still not drawing any definitive conclusion about what this is. We will keep updating this page as long as it lasts.

Updated: 28 July 2026.

Update, 31 July 2026: discover.aigc is gone

The cards have stopped. The last discover.aigc card we recorded was served around 16:00 UTC on 28 July 2026. Since then, nothing: three full days with not a single card in any language we cover.

Share of voice among Discover articles, full days:

It did not taper off over a week. It fell away over a single morning: the volume declined hour by hour through the morning of 28 July, then stopped outright in the afternoon.

Our previous update, published on 28 July, said the rise had stopped but the level had not come down. That was written in the middle of the day, while the decline was already under way, and the numbers we had at that point were incomplete. The full day came in at 1.36 % in English and 0.48 % in French, well below the 3.7 % and 1.25 % of the day before. The table above supersedes it.

The other languages did the same thing on the same day. Japanese, which had been the highest of any language we track since 25 July, went from 4.34 % on 27 July to 1.35 % on 28 July and then to zero. Korean and Spanish followed the same shape.

So the whole episode lasted about a week: first URLs in our index on 16 July, first cards served on 22 July, a peak on 26 and 27 July, and gone by the evening of 28 July.

We still cannot tell you what it was. The shape of it, a fast ramp across many languages at once and then an abrupt stop on a single afternoon, fits either a test that was switched off or a bug that was fixed. We have no way of telling those two apart from the outside, and we are not going to guess.

We are leaving this page up. The URLs are still in our index, the pattern is documented, and if discover.aigc comes back we will know within a day and we will say so here.

Updated: 31 July 2026.