Four years ago, Pinterest was bleeding users.
The platform known for mood boards had made a big effort to compete with TikTok — as did nearly every other social media platform at the time — with short-form video, shoppable livestreaming, and paying creators.
It didn’t work. When Bill Ready took over as Pinterest’s CEO in 2022, he felt the company needed a new direction.
“I didn’t think the world needed a fourth or fifth best TikTok,” Ready told Business Insider in an interview. Ready, who left his previous post as Google’s president of commerce, decided that a search experience that was both personalized to each user and highly visual would be the platform’s special sauce.
This story is part of a series exploring the changing online search landscape and its impact on consumers, media companies, advertisers, and tech platforms.
“Search is the core of the business,” Ready said. “The business didn’t have that clarity three years ago.”
Pinterest’s user growth has rebounded since Ready’s takeover, steadily increasing for the past nine quarters. It recently hit 600 million monthly active users, and about two-thirds of the interactions on the platform are related to search.
Pinterest’s focus on search has been a hit with users, with about 80 billion monthly search queries, according to the company.
It’s also helped Pinterest win over Gen Z users.
More than half the platform’s users are now Gen Z, Ready said. In a 2025 survey conducted by Adobe of 800 consumers and 200 business owners, 47% of Gen Z respondents said they used Pinterest for search.
“At the core of why we’re winning with Gen Z is what we’re doing with visual search and what we’re doing to make it more positive than social media,” Ready said.
Pinterest has more to prove. The company’s share price hasn’t returned to its pandemic high. While Pinterest’s revenue increased 17% year-over-year in the third quarter, its stock plummeted over 20% following its earnings release, which included an earnings miss and weak guidance for the fourth quarter. Pinterest management said ad sales had been negatively affected by tariffs.
Raymond James analyst Josh Beck rated the company at a neutral “market perform” following the third-quarter earnings, but wrote he was “encouraged” by Pinterest’s broader progress in shopping and “untapped” advertising opportunity.
Search will continue to play a significant role in Pinterest’s advertising strategy, as Ready emphasized in its latest earnings that Pinterest search results are “highly commercial in nature.”
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
Broadly, search has been undergoing a shake-up due to new consumer behaviors, such as using TikTok or ChatGPT to find answers. Advancements in technology, including visual search, are shifting how people — especially younger generations — search, said EMARKETER analyst Sky Canaves. (EMARKETER is a sister company to Business Insider.)
“Whatever is the easiest way to find information and has the least amount of friction will be most likely to be used for the particular search cases, whether it’s voice, or text, or images,” Canaves said.
How search is transforming Pinterest’s business
Pinterest has rolled out a series of revamped search tools under Ready’s watch, including an AI-powered tool that enables users to discover content tailored to their body type, skin tone, and hair pattern.
In May, the platform expanded its “visual search” features, allowing users to find exact products or similar items. It’s a category that competitors like Google, TikTok, and new startups are also targeting.
Here’s how it works: Imagine you’re redecorating your apartment and save an image for inspiration to your Pinterest board. With visual search, you can shop right from that image — clicking on a lamp, for example, will surface links to similar items and sometimes an exact match.
With stronger search tools — and the data that comes with them — Pinterest has opened up more doors for advertisers and in-app shopping.
Lower-funnel ads, meaning ads that drive the user to make a purchase, make up two-thirds of Pinterest’s business, Ready said.
“Search behaviors are key inputs powering its ads business,” Forrester analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf told Business Insider. “That intel makes Pinterest a really attractive high-intent surface for advertisers.”
AI is also playing a significant role in how users shop via Pinterest by learning their tastes.
“Effectively, what we’ve created is an AI-powered shopping assistant,” Ready said. In October, Pinterest officially launched a shopping assistant tool that users can chat with verbally or over text.
Users who visit Pinterest to search, whether for shopping or inspiration, are “more valuable” than pass-by scrollers, said Kamran Ansari, Pinterest’s former head of corporate development.
“The whole reason why Google built a $3 trillion company is search has the highest kind of intent signal of anything you can possibly do,” Ansari said.
Why search is ‘up for grabs’ more than ever
Ready, who worked at Google for a little over two years before joining Pinterest, is well acquainted with the stakes in search.
Google still owns about 90% of the market share for traditional search, according to data from Cloudflare.
In a March EMARKETER survey, 93% of US consumers said they had used Google in the last year. There were also many players cited in the EMARKETER survey that fall outside the traditional search market, from e-commerce platforms like Amazon (56%) and Walmart (45%) to video platforms like YouTube (49%) and TikTok (29%).
“The future of search is more up for grabs than it has been in the last 25 years,” Ready said.
According to a recent McKinsey survey of US consumers, about 50% said they “intentionally seek out AI-powered search engines, with a majority of users saying it’s the top digital source they use to make buying decisions.”
As players like ChatGPT and Perplexity aim to battle Google for the wider, all-purpose search market, Pinterest is focused on improving its visually driven niche, Ready said.
