New Delhi: Pinterest CEO Bill Ready sought to reassure investors after the company posted weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter results, arguing that the platform should be viewed as a powerful search engine rather than just a social app.
Speaking after the earnings release, Ready compared Pinterest’s scale to ChatGPT, pointing to data that shows Pinterest handling a similar volume of searches each month.
According to Ready, ChatGPT processes about 75 billion searches per month, while Pinterest sees roughly 80 billion searches, which translate into around 1.7 billion clicks. “That makes us one of the largest search destinations in the world,” he said.
He added, “Pinterest searches are far more commercial, noting that over half of them are tied to shopping intent, compared with only about 2% of ChatGPT searches.”
The comments followed a disappointing earnings report. Pinterest reported $1.32 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, slightly below expectations, while earnings per share also missed forecasts.
The company’s revenue outlook for the first quarter of 2026 came in lower than what analysts had anticipated, citing reduced ad spending from large advertisers in Europe and disruption in its home category following new furniture tariffs.
Despite the financial miss, user growth remained strong. Monthly active users climbed 12% year over year to 619 million, beating market estimates. Still, investors reacted sharply, sending Pinterest shares down 20% in after-hours trading.
The results highlight Pinterest’s long-standing challenge of turning high user engagement into steady advertising revenue. As AI-driven platforms grow more attractive to advertisers, this gap may widen.
Addressing competition from AI-powered shopping tools, Ready pointed to Pinterest’s strengths in visual discovery and personalisation, which surface products without typed prompts. He also referenced the company’s Amazon partnership and added, “That’ll actually be one of the easiest parts of the commercial journey to solve.”
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