Pinterest Visual Search Ads: how the new format works and who should test it

What Pinterest Visual Search Ads are

Pinterest Visual Search Ads are an ad format that places an advertiser in Pinterest search results and in Pin closeups, the full view that opens when someone taps a Pin. Pinterest announced the format on September 17, 2026 at Pinterest Presents, its yearly advertiser summit, in a newsroom post. The post says the format pairs keyword relevance with a distinctive new ad format. It says advertisers can "bid for a top response" that sends people straight to their own site. Pinterest has not defined a top response or said how many there are per page.

Pinterest says Visual Search Ads support lower-funnel objectives and work with Pinterest Performance+, its automated campaign mode. Pinterest's chief executive, Bill Ready, says the format is powered by Pinterest Intelligence, Pinterest's name for AI-based visual understanding of images, products, taste and intent.

The case Pinterest makes rests on search volume. The announcement says Pinterest users run more than 80 billion searches a month, that most are visual and that more than half are commercial. Its footnote gives the source as Pinterest internal data from its Q2 2026 earnings. That figure does not appear in the earnings press release for the quarter. In those Q2 2026 results, published on August 4, 2026, Pinterest reported 640 million monthly active users, up 11% on a year earlier. Pinterest's UK festive marketing page adds that visual searches grew 2.3 times faster than text searches in the UK in the fourth quarter of 2025, against the same quarter of 2024.

Where Visual Search Ads appear, next to Pinterest's other search ads

Visual Search Ads appear in Pinterest search results and Pin closeups, which makes them a new way for an advertiser to reach people searching Pinterest. Two bid-based ways already exist: keyword targeting on the Search placement, which any advertiser can set up, and Top of Search ads, which need access through a Pinterest account manager.

Pinterest's placement targeting page sets the default ad group placement to All, which covers search and browse. An ad group that never chose a placement already runs in search results. Its keyword targeting page has keywords switched on separately, under Interests and keywords. It allows up to 20,000 keywords per ad group and recommends at least 25.

Pinterest's Top of Search ads help page says the format is not available to everyone and that access goes through an account manager. Once access is granted, the advertiser ticks Enable premium placements when creating a consideration, leads or sales campaign.

Pinterest also sells reserved search placements outside the auction. Its Premiere Spotlight help page describes Premiere Spotlight on search, which holds the first ad placement in the search page carousel for a whole day. Premiere Spotlight Category Takeover holds the first ad placement across relevant search results, related Pins and boards, on mobile in the US only. Both are priced per day, need a reservation and are set up by Pinterest's account team.

Top slots carry much of the click volume. Pinterest's Top of Search ads post, dated January 27, 2026 on its UK business blog, says 45% of clicks on ads in search and Related Pins came from the top ten results, in its global data for May 2025. The Visual Search Ads announcement does not mention Top of Search ads. Pinterest has not said whether the new format replaces them, absorbs them or runs beside them.

Who can get Visual Search Ads, and when

Visual Search Ads are due in beta for eligible advertisers in all Pinterest ad markets, in the weeks after the September 17, 2026 announcement. Pinterest's ads availability page listed 88 countries and territories on October 6, 2026, from Albania to Vietnam, and says ads are available to Pinterest Business accounts there. Pinterest has not defined which advertisers count as eligible.

A site search of Pinterest's help center and business site for the format's name on October 6, 2026 returned no help article or spec page. Until one appears, the newsroom post is the only description Pinterest has published. In a Modern Retail report on launch day, Chloe Wix, Pinterest's vice president of go-to-market, said the format works with the campaign assets advertisers already have.

The markets in the beta earn Pinterest different amounts. In Q2 2026 the US and Canada had 106 million of Pinterest's 640 million monthly active users. They brought in $880 million of its $1.18 billion revenue. Europe had 157 million users and $213 million revenue. A result measured on US advertisers may not carry over to another market.

What else Pinterest changed in Performance+ and ads

Pinterest's newsroom post names three more advertiser tools announced with Visual Search Ads on September 17, 2026: Priority Products in Performance+, self-serve A/B testing, and an App Promotion objective. It also announced Restyle, a feature for Pinterest users rather than advertisers, and a second season of Bring My Pinterest to Life, its connected-TV series with brands.

Priority Products answers a limit that Pinterest's Performance+ help page describes. A Performance+ Sales campaign uses the All Products product group, with no product group picker. Pinterest's Priority Products help page now lets an advertiser pick up to five product groups to prioritize, in Performance+ Sales campaigns only. The same page says delivery still optimizes across the full catalog. Performance+ limits extra targeting to country, age and customer lists. Placement appears in Performance+ reporting as a breakdown for insights only, not as a setting.

Pinterest's A/B testing help page lists four test variables: creative; targeting; objective, budget or optimization; and a Performance+ campaign against custom campaigns. Pinterest assigns each person to one test group at random.

Pinterest's campaign objectives page listed five objectives on October 6, 2026: brand awareness, video completion, consideration, leads and sales. App Promotion was not among them, which fits a beta limited to qualified advertisers.

How to read Pinterest's performance figures

Pinterest's performance figures carry footnotes that give the sample, the dates and the attribution window, and those details limit what each number can show. On both the newsroom post and the Top of Search post, the footnotes sit in a collapsed Footnotes panel at the foot of the page.

Three rules follow from the footnotes:

1. A figure from one advertiser is a single case with a date range, not an expected result.
2. Compare results on the same attribution window. Pinterest writes a window as click/view, days after a click and then days after a view, in its offline conversions help. Its reporting help recommends 30/30. The 85% figure used 30/1, which is also what Conversion insights shows when no window is chosen. The JCPenney figures on the Top of Search post used 7/1.
3. A click-through rate lift is not a cost or revenue result. For a format sold on lower-funnel objectives, judge it on cost per conversion or return on spend.

Who should test Visual Search Ads first, and how

Visual Search Ads are most likely to suit an advertiser that already runs lower-funnel campaigns on Pinterest and can measure what happens on its own site, because Pinterest says the format supports lower-funnel objectives and Performance+. Four signs an account is ready:

• It sells in one of the markets on Pinterest's ads availability page, from a Pinterest Business account.
• It runs Leads or Sales campaigns today. Performance+ can use conversions and add to cart as conversion events on those objectives, so the site has to report them.
• Its search ads already find demand. Pinterest's reporting dashboard has a keywords tab that shows results keyword by keyword.
• It has a baseline to beat: search placement results from the last few weeks on the same objective.

An advertiser that runs awareness campaigns only, or cannot report conversions from its site, has less to learn from the beta. When the beta reaches an account, a fair test looks like this:

1. Split search from browse in the current campaign, so the baseline measures search alone. The default placement mixes both. In a Performance+ campaign, where placement cannot be set, use the placement breakdown in reporting as the search baseline.
2. Fix one attribution window for both sides before the test starts, and write it down.
3. Run the current search ads and Visual Search Ads over the same dates with equal budgets. Pinterest's self-serve A/B testing runs under Experiments in Ads Manager, as its help on creating A/B tests describes. That page recommends a test of at least 14 days and requires every campaign in a test to be in the same market.
4. Compare cost per conversion and revenue, then click-through rate.
5. Check which products the ads served. A Performance+ Sales campaign draws on all products. Priority Products, now in the help center, lets an advertiser weight up to five product groups.

What advertisers control while specs are unpublished

Pinterest advertisers control their Pins, boards and words while the Visual Search Ads specs are unpublished. Pinterest ads are built from Pins: Pinterest's guide to becoming an advertiser describes a campaign as ad groups that promote Pins. Pinterest has not published creative specs for Visual Search Ads, and its go-to-market vice president has said the format needs no new creative. The Pins and boards a brand already publishes are what its current ads are made from.

Pinterest's v5 API description sets the limits for a Pin created through the API. A Pin belongs to a board, its title takes up to 100 characters, its description up to 800, its alt text up to 500 and its destination link up to 2,048. The API also creates Pins of 2 to 5 images. Our guide to social media character limits compares the 800 with the 500 many tables give for the description.

Pinterest has not said how it judges keyword relevance for Visual Search Ads. The words in a Pin's title and description, and the board it sits on, are the parts an advertiser controls, so they are worth writing in the terms people search for.

Where overads fits

overads fits the organic side of Pinterest, not the paid side. overads Publish schedules Pins alongside posts to X, LinkedIn, Bluesky and Mastodon from one composer, with a board picked per Pin. It applies Pinterest's board, title and description limits (a board per Pin, 100 characters for the title, 800 for the description), as its Pinterest channel page states. It adds one narrower rule: a Pin carries one image or one video, while Pinterest's API also takes Pins of 2 to 5 images.

What overads does not do:

• It does not buy, manage or report Pinterest ads, Visual Search Ads included. overads Ads manager reads Meta, Google and Snapchat ad accounts, read-only, and proposes changes a person applies; Pinterest is not among its ad platforms.
• On October 6, 2026 it did not publish to Instagram, Facebook, Threads, YouTube or TikTok for customers.
• It does not pick ad keywords or bids, or predict which Pins Pinterest will match to a search.

Pinterest's own Ads Manager is where Pinterest ads are bought and reported, and a Pinterest account manager is the route to Top of Search ads and Premiere Spotlight. A team that posts only to Pinterest can create its Pins in Pinterest itself. Our guide to why many ad tools read campaigns but cannot change them explains the read-only line overads draws on the ad platforms it does connect.