See GNU documentation for the -q/--brief option:

When you only want to find out whether files are different, and you don’t care what the differences are, you can use the summary output format. In this format, instead of showing the differences between the files, diff simply reports whether files differ. The --brief (-q) option selects this output format.

This format is especially useful when comparing the contents of two directories. It is also much faster than doing the normal line by line comparisons, because diff can stop analyzing the files as soon as it knows that there are any differences.