Bitcoin Difficulty granularity Difficulty adjusts by very granular percentages to target for 10 minutes blocks. But adding another zero at the end of the chain of zeroes from the header hash requirement for a valid block would increase the difficulty exponential. So how does the Alogrithm target so precisely the right difficuly only through the use of "zeroes"?
The difficulty is actually represented by the target threshold encoded in the nBits value in the block header. Where difficulty represents the human readable representation ("how often do we need to try to find a solution"), the target threshold defines the prefix a block must undershoot in order to be valid. This means that the 256-bit block hash interpreted as a number must be lower than the target threshold.
Although, nBits is only a 4-byte value, it is a compressed representation of a 256-bit (32-byte) number. The first byte defines the exponent, the remaining three bytes give a 24-bit mantissa for the target.

While this leaves most of the 32 byte in the target threshold to be just composed of zeroes, the difficulty can adjust in a much more granular fashion than just adding leading zeros.

David Harding has elaborated the full details in How is the target section of a block header calculated?.