Pinterest Introduces Visual Search Ads for Product Discovery

On September 17, 2026, Pinterest introduced Visual Search Ads at its annual Pinterest Presents event. The new advertising format allows brands to promote their products directly within visual search results.

For clothing manufacturers, furniture brands, jewelry companies, and other businesses selling products that shoppers often choose based on appearance, this is a particularly interesting update. Ads can now appear not only in the regular Pinterest feed or among text search results, but also when someone is looking at a photo and trying to find a similar product.

For example, a shopper sees a dress with an interesting silhouette in a photo but does not know its name or manufacturer. She can use Pinterest's visual search to find similar styles. Visual Search Ads gives brands the opportunity to advertise their dresses among those results and attract shoppers who are already interested in a particular style.

At launch, the format is available to a limited group of advertisers as part of beta testing.

How Pinterest Visual Search Works

Pinterest has long been more than just a collection of beautiful photos. For millions of users, it is a starting point for choosing clothing, decorating their homes, finding gifts, and planning purchases.

Unlike Google, where people typically begin searching with a text query, the process on Pinterest often works in reverse: users first see something they like and then try to figure out where they can buy something similar.

This is precisely why Pinterest has been developing its visual search tools.

Consider a few situations:

• A shopper sees a photo of a summer dress with unusual sleeves and wants to find a similar style in a different color.
• An apartment owner is looking at a living room interior and trying to find the armchair positioned next to the sofa.
• A shopper saves a photo of a ring and looks for jewelry with a similar design but in a different price range.

In each case, it is difficult for the person to formulate an exact search query. However, they can show Pinterest an image or select the object they are interested in within a photo.

The platform's algorithms analyze the item's shape, color, material, and other visual characteristics, then suggest similar products and images.

According to Pinterest, users perform more than 80 billion searches each month. A significant share of these searches is related to choosing products, finding shopping ideas, and comparing options.

For online retailers, the value of this behavior is clear: shoppers may not yet know a particular brand, but they already have an idea of the product they want to buy.

What Changed With the Launch of Pinterest Visual Search Ads?

Before the introduction of Visual Search Ads, advertisers could already promote products through Pinterest Shopping Ads, regular promoted Pins, and Performance+ campaigns.

However, ads in these formats were not always directly connected to the specific object a user was trying to identify in a photo.

Visual Search Ads allows brands to place advertising offers directly within the process of visually searching for similar products.

Pinterest supports placements in two primary scenarios:

• Search Results: When a user searches for products or images, an advertiser can receive prominent placement among the suggested results.
• Pin Closeups: When someone opens a photo they like to examine it more closely, Pinterest can display advertising offers related to the image's content.

Consider an online furniture retailer that sells designer armchairs.

A user opens a photo of an interior featuring a similar armchair. Pinterest recognizes the piece of furniture and suggests products that match its appearance. An ad from the furniture retailer can now appear among those suggestions and link directly to the product page.

The shopper does not necessarily have to enter a query such as "buy designer armchair" or search for a particular manufacturer. Their interest in the product has already been expressed through the image.

This is the main difference between the new format and conventional keyword-based advertising: brands can show products to shoppers who know what they like but do not yet know what the product is called or where it is sold.

What Opportunities Do Visual Search Ads Offer Online Retailers?

The main advantage of the new advertising format is the opportunity to reach shoppers during the product selection stage, before they have decided on a brand.

This creates different promotional opportunities for different business categories.

Clothing and Fashion Brands

Consider a women's clothing brand that produces dresses made from natural linen.

A potential customer saves photos of summer outfits and searches for a dress with a similar silhouette. She may never have heard of the advertiser's brand and would not have searched for its name on Google.

Visual Search Ads allows the brand to show her a suitable style precisely when she is looking for similar items.

For fashion brands, this creates an opportunity to compete not only through brand awareness and advertising budgets, but also through the products themselves: their design, cut, color, and photography quality.

The format is particularly interesting for smaller brands with a distinctive style that have not yet achieved high brand awareness.

Furniture and Home Goods

Furniture shopping often begins with photos of completed interiors.

Someone may spend months saving images of kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms while gradually choosing a style for their future home.

At the same time, they may be interested in specific products, including sofas, tables, lighting fixtures, mirrors, and decorative accessories.

With Visual Search Ads, a furniture retailer can advertise relevant products to users looking for similar items in interior photos.

This approach is particularly promising for companies selling furniture with distinctive design features that are difficult to describe using ordinary text queries.

Jewelry and Accessories

In the jewelry category, a product's appearance often plays a decisive role.

A shopper may be looking for a ring with a particular shape, earrings with an unusual fastening, or jewelry inspired by a specific historical period without knowing the professional terms for these products.

Visual search makes it possible to find similar designs, while Visual Search Ads allows brands to present their own jewelry alongside search results.

For smaller jewelry brands, this creates an opportunity to attract shoppers who are primarily interested in a piece's design rather than the manufacturer's reputation.

How to Launch Pinterest Visual Search Ads

Pinterest introduced Visual Search Ads as a new advertising product with limited availability.

As of October 2026, the format remains in beta testing and is not yet available to all advertisers.

The company confirmed that Visual Search Ads is compatible with Pinterest Performance+, its automated system that helps manage advertising campaigns and optimize them for results.

However, Pinterest has not yet published universal self-service launch instructions for the new format, a separate pricing schedule, or a comprehensive list of requirements for participating in the beta.

Advertisers interested in testing Visual Search Ads should check product availability in Pinterest Ads Manager or contact a Pinterest representative.

When preparing for launch, it is important to focus on several areas:

• Product catalog: The product assortment, prices, and availability should be updated regularly.
• Image quality: Photos should clearly show the product itself, its shape, color, and key characteristics. For clothing and furniture, both product-only photos and images showing products in real-world settings can be useful.
• Product pages: Users should land on the page of the exact product that attracted their attention, with clear pricing and an option to purchase.
• Sales tracking: Pinterest Tag and, where applicable, Conversions API should be configured correctly to measure purchases and revenue.

Visual Search Ads does not eliminate the need for high-quality catalog management and advertising assets. On the contrary, because the search process is based on visual similarity, the quality of product imagery becomes even more important.

How Effective Is Pinterest Visual Search Advertising?

At launch, Pinterest had not presented enough independent performance data to determine average cost per click, cost per conversion, or typical ROAS for Visual Search Ads.

There is also insufficient public data to confidently compare the new format with standard Shopping Ads and Performance+ advertising.

Nevertheless, the underlying placement model looks promising for online retailers.

In traditional display advertising, a brand attempts to capture a user's interest with its offer. In visual search, interest in a particular type of product already exists, and the ad helps the shopper find a suitable option.

However, this does not guarantee lower conversion costs. Customer acquisition costs will depend on competition, product pricing, image quality, and the online retailer's ability to convert interest into actual sales.

In addition, some purchases may shift between existing Pinterest campaigns and the new format.

For this reason, test results should be evaluated not only through the ROAS of an individual campaign, but also through overall sales growth, the number of new customers, and incremental revenue.

Affect's Takeaway: An Opportunity to Sell Products Before Shoppers Search for a Specific Brand

Pinterest Visual Search Ads is an interesting expansion of advertising opportunities for online retailers selling products with distinctive visual characteristics.

Shoppers do not always know a product's name, manufacturer, or even the right words to describe what they want. But they often know exactly what they like.

Visual Search Ads helps brands appear alongside those shoppers at the moment they are searching for similar products.

For clothing, furniture, jewelry, and accessories retailers, this creates an opportunity to attract shoppers not only through brand awareness or search queries, but also through the visual appeal of their product assortment.

Affect recommends paying particular attention to the new format for online retailers that already use Pinterest Shopping Ads and Performance+, maintain a high-quality product catalog, and are ready to test additional sources of sales.

While Visual Search Ads remains a beta product, it is too early to draw conclusions about its effectiveness. However, the direction of Pinterest's development is clear: the platform aims to turn the discovery of attractive images into a comprehensive tool for selecting and purchasing products.

Sources

1. Pinterest Newsroom: New Pinterest Visual Search Performance Ads, September 17, 2026. Pinterest Newsroom
2. Pinterest Help Center: Use Visual Search Features. Pinterest Help Center
3. Search Engine Land: Pinterest Turns Visual Search Into a New Ad Opportunity. Search Engine Land
4. EMARKETER: Pinterest Opens Visual Search to Ads as Shoppers Compare Products. EMARKETER