Search is turning into a visual medium faster than most ad platforms have adapted to it, and Pinterest just built a product specifically for the moment a shopper is looking at an image instead of typing a query.
At its Pinterest Presents advertiser event on September 17, the company unveiled Visual Search Ads, a new format that places sponsored results directly inside Pinterest’s search results and pin close-ups when someone searches visually rather than by keyword. Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said the format lets “marketers tap into this new and rapidly growing form of AI-powered search with prominent placement at critical decision points.” Pinterest also expanded its Performance+ suite with Priority Products for seasonal promotions and App Promotion, a dedicated app-install objective now in global beta; the company said one advertiser saw up to an 85% improvement in cost per install using it. Pinterest runs more than 80 billion searches a month, and the company says more than half of those are commercial in nature.
The launch matters for the marketing leader because it is a direct bet that visual search, not text search, is where a growing share of product discovery is happening, and that advertisers who wait for the format to mature on someone else’s platform will be buying attention that has already been priced by early movers. Visual Search Ads require no new creative assets from advertisers, which lowers the operational cost of testing the format against a text-search buy in the same budget cycle.
The original insight is less about Pinterest specifically and more about where AI-powered search competition is happening: not just in chat interfaces like ChatGPT or Gemini, but inside the visual discovery layer of platforms that were never primarily search engines. A retailer building an AI-search strategy around answer engines alone is missing a channel with 80 billion monthly searches and purchase intent built into the query itself. Pairing that with formats already emerging for AI chat surfaces suggests visual and conversational search need separate measurement, not one shared budget line.
Source: Pinterest Newsroom
