Pinterest Rolls Out Visual Search Ads and Expanded AI Ad Suite for Brands

The features were announced at the company's "Pinterest Presents" event on Tuesday and are set to roll out over the coming weeks. The centerpiece, Visual Search Ads, gives brands prominent placement in search results and inside Pin close-ups, the enlarged views users see when they tap a Pin.

Alongside that, Pinterest is broadening its automated advertising product, Pinterest Performance+, to add manual A/B testing tools. Chief executive Bill Ready framed the updates as evidence the platform is maturing into a full-funnel marketing machine rather than a purely upper-funnel destination.

Ready told advertisers that users come to Pinterest with clear intent but before they have settled on what to buy, describing that window as the moment for a marketer to reach a potential customer. He acknowledged that for much of the company's history Pinterest was a strong place to build awareness but not to drive results, and said AI is now powering the shift.

Executives pointed to scale as the core pitch: 640 million people use Pinterest monthly, more than half of them from Gen Z, and the platform says its users run over 80 billion searches a month. More than half of those searches relate to buying a product or finding a specific item.

Pinterest also noted that 96% of searches on the platform are unbranded, a figure it presents as open space for advertisers to capture demand before shoppers commit to a label.