Just four years ago, Pinterest found itself in a precarious position, struggling to retain users and watching its audience steadily decline. The once-beloved platform, long celebrated for its mood boards and carefully curated collections of visual inspiration, was bleeding active users despite its efforts to reinvent itself. Like nearly every other major social media company at the time, Pinterest sought to capture the short attention spans of a generation increasingly enthralled by TikTok’s dynamic short-form videos. It invested heavily in experimental formats—ranging from bite-sized video clips and shoppable livestreaming to incentive programs for creators—all designed to recapture engagement and win back cultural relevance. Yet, despite those bold undertakings, the strategy failed to deliver the desired results.
In 2022, a major leadership change brought new energy and direction to the company. Bill Ready assumed the role of CEO, inheriting a business uncertain about its identity in a crowded digital landscape. Upon taking over, Ready quickly concluded that Pinterest had veered too far from its roots. As he explained in an interview with Business Insider, he saw little merit in attempting to build, as he put it, “the fourth or fifth best TikTok.” Ready, who had previously served as Google’s president of commerce, envisioned instead a revival built around what Pinterest did best: enabling people to discover inspiration visually. His strategic hypothesis was clear—Pinterest’s competitive advantage would stem from its ability to deliver a personalized, highly visual search experience, where users could explore ideas in a uniquely engaging way that combined beauty with utility.
This transformation is part of a broader industry-wide reconsideration of how online search is evolving and how these changes ripple outward to affect consumers, advertisers, media outlets, and the technology platforms that mediate digital life. “Search is the core of the business,” Ready declared emphatically. He noted that only a few years earlier, Pinterest had lacked a coherent understanding of that fundamental truth. Under his guidance, however, a renewed focus on search brought the platform consistent user growth. Over nine consecutive quarters, Pinterest steadily regained momentum, reaching 600 million monthly active users. Notably, approximately two-thirds of all user interactions now stem directly from search-related activities, demonstrating the success of the company’s repositioning.
The renewed emphasis on search has struck a chord with users. According to Pinterest, the platform now hosts around 80 billion search queries each month—a remarkable scale that signals the significance of the pivot. The impact has been especially pronounced among younger audiences. Gen Z, the demographic shaping the next wave of digital behavior, has gravitated toward Pinterest’s reimagined experience. Ready reported that more than half of the site’s users now belong to Gen Z, and an Adobe survey conducted in 2025 confirmed this shift: nearly half of Gen Z participants—47%—said they actively used Pinterest as a search tool. Ready attributes this success to the platform’s focus on visual search technology and its deliberate effort to make browsing feel like a positive, uplifting experience in contrast with the often chaotic atmosphere of traditional social media.
Still, Pinterest’s transformation story is ongoing. From a financial standpoint, the company continues to face challenges. Its share price remains well below the highs of the early pandemic era. Although Pinterest’s third-quarter revenue increased 17% year over year, the market reacted pessimistically: the stock tumbled more than 20% after the earnings announcement, weighed down by an earnings miss, muted fourth-quarter guidance, and management’s acknowledgment that tariff-related factors had negatively affected ad sales. Analysts, however, are cautiously optimistic. Raymond James’s Josh Beck rated the stock as a “market perform” but described himself as encouraged by Pinterest’s progress in expanding its shopping features and exploring new, untapped advertising opportunities. Ready, for his part, reiterated during the company’s earnings call that search remains central to Pinterest’s advertising model, emphasizing that the majority of search results are “highly commercial in nature,” making them ideal entry points for advertisers looking to engage motivated buyers.
The renewed focus on search comes at a moment when the broader search ecosystem is being fundamentally disrupted. New consumer habits—like using TikTok or generative AI tools such as ChatGPT for queries that once lived exclusively on Google—have upended what it means to search online. EMARKETER analyst Sky Canaves noted that the rapid evolution of technology, from advances in AI to the mainstreaming of visual and voice-based tools, is dramatically reshaping how users, especially younger ones, locate information. As Canaves put it, “whatever method requires the least friction—whether voice, text, or image—will ultimately dominate specific search contexts.”
To adapt, Pinterest under Ready has rolled out an ambitious series of innovations designed to redefine what discovery and search feel like on the platform. Among these offerings is an AI-driven feature that tailors results based on a user’s unique characteristics such as body shape, skin tone, and hair type—an acknowledgment of the importance of representation and personalization in digital experiences. In May, Pinterest unveiled an expanded suite of visual search capabilities that allow users to identify and shop items directly from images they admire. The process is intuitive: imagine pinning an interior-design photo to your board. With one click, you can now zoom into a lamp featured in that image to instantly find exact or similar products available for purchase. This seamless interplay of inspiration and transaction exemplifies Ready’s vision of merging imagination with intent.
These advanced search tools have also reshaped Pinterest’s commercial ecosystem. The company’s advertising model increasingly centers around what marketers call lower-funnel ads—campaigns designed to translate browsing into immediate purchases. Ready revealed that such ads now constitute roughly two-thirds of Pinterest’s total business. Analysts have taken notice as well. Forrester’s Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf told Business Insider that search activity provides the crucial behavioral data fueling Pinterest’s ad engine, making the platform “a very attractive, high-intent surface” for advertisers eager to reach consumers who are already close to making decisions.
Artificial intelligence further enriches this ecosystem by continuously learning from user tastes and preferences. Pinterest’s AI-powered shopping assistant, launched officially in October, embodies this fusion: users can interact with it through text or voice to refine ideas, seek inspiration, and navigate product options. As Ready explained, the assistant functions like a personal stylist or design consultant—an adaptive guide fine-tuned to each user’s aesthetic instincts. Former Pinterest executive Kamran Ansari underscored the importance of this approach, observing that search activities indicate the strongest form of customer intent. He compared Pinterest’s opportunity to Google’s monumental success, noting that the latter’s dominance—and its trillion-dollar valuation—was built on the unmatched power of search as an indicator of consumer behavior.
Ready, having spent more than two years at Google before joining Pinterest, uniquely understands what is at stake. Despite Google’s near-total hold on traditional search—retaining roughly 90% of market share, according to Cloudflare—he sees cracks in that monopoly. A March EMARKETER survey found that while 93% of U.S. consumers still used Google within the past year, a growing share of users now turn to other search alternatives across commerce and entertainment. Amazon, Walmart, YouTube, and TikTok each command meaningful slices of user attention, reflecting a fragmented landscape where the definition of “search” extends far beyond typing words into a box. “The future of search is more up for grabs than it has been in the last twenty-five years,” Ready observed, characterizing this as a historical opening for innovation.
Recent research by McKinsey supports this perspective. Roughly half of surveyed U.S. consumers said they actively seek out AI-powered search engines, with most of them identifying such tools as their primary digital source for purchase decisions. As generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity mount challenges to Google’s dominance in generalized search, Pinterest aims to solidify its prominence within a more specialized niche—visual search—where imagery, context, and emotional resonance form the foundation of the user experience. Through this nuanced and forward-looking focus, Ready hopes to position Pinterest at the intersection of creativity and commerce, redefining what it means to discover, imagine, and act in the digital age.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-ceo-bill-ready-search-strategy-google-2025-11
