Why Pinterest’s CEO is betting the company’s future on search
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, Pinterest is redefining its approach to search under the leadership of CEO Bill Ready, who took the helm in 2022. Faced with declining user engagement and competition from platforms like TikTok, Ready recognized that Pinterest needed to pivot from its previous attempts to mimic short-form video trends. Instead, he emphasized a distinctive search experience that prioritizes personalization and visual elements. “Search is the core of the business,” Ready stated, highlighting how the platform has rebounded, now boasting 600 million monthly active users, with around 80 billion search queries each month. Notably, more than half of Pinterest’s users are from Generation Z, a demographic increasingly turning to the platform for search-related needs.
Pinterest’s renewed focus on search has led to a series of innovative tools designed to enhance user experience. Among these is an AI-powered feature that tailors content discovery based on individual characteristics, such as body type and skin tone. Additionally, Pinterest has expanded its visual search capabilities, allowing users to find products directly from images, a feature that not only improves user engagement but also opens doors for advertisers. Lower-funnel ads, which prompt immediate purchases, now account for two-thirds of Pinterest’s business, making the platform an attractive option for brands. Despite recent challenges, including a dip in stock prices following disappointing earnings, analysts remain optimistic about Pinterest’s potential in the advertising space, particularly due to the valuable insights gleaned from user search behaviors.
As the search landscape becomes increasingly competitive, with traditional players like Google still holding a significant market share, Ready believes that the future of search is more uncertain than ever. The rise of AI-driven search engines and alternative platforms like TikTok and Amazon indicates a shift in consumer behavior, with an increasing number of users seeking visually engaging and personalized search experiences. By honing in on its unique strengths in visual search, Pinterest aims to carve out a niche in this evolving market, positioning itself as a key player in the future of online search.
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Pinterest CEO Bill Ready is all in on search.
Google dominates the all-purpose search market, but rivals are making gains in particular niches.
This story is one of a five-part series exploring the changing online search landscape.
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.
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“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.”
Bill Ready joined Pinterest as CEO in 2022.
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.
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