Dive Brief:
- Pinterest is focusing on visual search and product discovery to establish itself as a leader of AI-driven experiences in a “Cambrian moment,” CEO Bill Ready said during a Q2 2025 earnings call Thursday.
- The social media platform launched a proprietary generative retrieval model on search and related services to further improve personalization. The model is trained on past user activity and is designed to generate an initial set of potential pins for users with relevant and fresh content.
- “Our investments in driving deeper relevance and personalization for our users has led to cumulative gains across the business,” Ready said during the call. Benefits include a 230-basis-point lift in Pinterest’s year-to-date search fulfillment rate, meaning users are more likely to find what they’re looking for.
Dive Insight:
Pinterest has “effectively become an AI-enabled shopping assistant,” even if that isn’t the way users think of the platform, Ready said.
“Pinterest has been at the forefront of visual search and has helped create an entirely new way in which users discover, explore their taste and ultimately shop,” Ready said. “As we have significantly improved the relevance and personalization of our content using AI, we've become a destination for our users to explore their expansive set of commercial journeys.”
The Pinterest app offers proactive recommendations that align with users’ style tastes and preferences the same way a human shopping assistant would, according to Ready. Even if the idea of consumers using agentic AI to make purchases has yet to arrive on the platform, many are already open to AI-curated suggestions.
“If we look at what's happening on our platform already, we're able to take the user much further down that shopping journey, assisting them, as I mentioned, with the relevancy of our recommendations that's effectively taking the user much further down the shopping journey without them having to do the work,” Ready said.
Some retailers are already offering AI-powered assistants. EBay rolled out a conversational AI shopping agent that offers advice based on customer preferences in May, while Amazon started testing Buy for Me, which can purchase items from third-party sites without customers leaving the Amazon Shopping app, in April.
Pinterest’s investments in AI and personalized curation are paying off. Revenue grew 17% year over year to $998 million in the second quarter of 2025, while global active monthly users were up 11% to 578 million, according to a company earnings release.
“It's abundantly clear that Pinterest is an AI winner,” Ready said. “We've never been more popular or valued by our users and more performant for our advertisers.”
The company’s emphasis on AI-powered visual search is resonating with Gen Z, who account for more than 50% of monthly active users, according to Ready. However, the investments aren’t limited to younger demographics — the company is growing across all generations and genders.
“They are coming for new types of purely visual search experiences, particularly in moments where a user may not have the words to precisely describe what they're looking for or will know it when they see it,” Ready said.
