PINTEREST, INC. (PINS) Business

Item 1. Business

Overview

Pinterest is an AI-powered visual search and discovery platform, positioned at the intersection of search, social, and commerce. We offer a unique and differentiated experience that enables people to go from inspiration to action all on one consumer internet property. Pinterest can be accessed through our mobile application or the web.

People use Pinterest to find useful, relevant ideas—and then bring them to life. People don’t always have the words to describe what they’re looking for, but often know it when they see it. As they browse Pinterest content (called “Pins”), they fine-tune their tastes and find the perfect idea. Users interact with the platform in dynamic multi-session journeys to find inspiration, curate their latest look, plan their next project and shop from great brands. This happens at a massive scale, with billions of searches and saves per month, with the vast majority of queries being visual.

The unique, first party, intent-based signal we receive from user actions on Pinterest helps power the AI based recommendation systems that we use to surface relevant and engaging content to our users.

AI also plays a central role in how we drive value for our advertisers, who come to Pinterest to reach our users with high commercial intent. The inspiration-to-action journey on Pinterest aligns with the advertiser marketing funnel, allowing us to help brands reach customers at every stage, from discovery to purchase, through digital ads.

We believe users and advertisers intentionally choose Pinterest because of our efforts to create a positive and more brand safe environment. As a result, we make deliberate decisions through our policies and product development and aim to deliver on that experience, creating value for advertisers who can showcase their product and services in an inspiring and positive environment.

Our Users and Our Platform

619 million monthly active users from around the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas, curate and refine their tastes, and turn those ideas into reality. Our platform particularly resonates with women, who comprise roughly two-thirds of our total user base. In addition, our platform also resonates with the younger generation, as Gen Z users represent over 50% of our user base. Geographically, we have a diverse user set, representing over 100 countries globally.

Content on Pinterest comes from a variety of sources, including retailers, brands, creators, publishers and users. We acquire that content via a wide range of methods including product catalog uploads, direct publishing, and user curation. Content formats include images that allow you to click into an idea to learn more, videos that provide the steps of an idea, collages that allow users to piece together different images into one, and products that brands and merchants upload from catalogs.

On Pinterest, users interact with several surfaces, each of which offers distinct functionalities and experiences. Users often move between these surfaces various times in a single session and across multiple sessions. Saving content and creating boards and collages are highly unique and beneficial to our ecosystem. This curation activity generates signals across a network of many billions of associations between Pins, searches, boards, products and users on our platform. Together, these connections comprise our valuable Taste Graph and help us serve users even more relevant content recommendations.

Home Feed: When users open the Pinterest mobile application or navigate to www.pinterest.com, they are by default in their Home Feed, where they can discover Pins relevant to their tastes and interests in a scrolling format. As users interact with more content - through searching, saving and curating - their Home Feed is designed to become even more representative of their interests.

Search Page: On the Search surface, users find Pins they are looking for by typing a query in the search bar. The search functionality allows users to see many relevant possibilities that are personalized for their individual taste

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and interests. Users often come to Pinterest with a vague idea of what they’re looking for and use our visual search functionality to narrow their focus. As such, over 90% of our searches are unbranded.

Related Pins: Visual discovery on Pinterest also happens when a user taps on a Pin to learn more about an idea or image, and a feed of visually similar Pins is served beneath the tapped image. These related Pins help users springboard off a point of inspiration to explore deeper into an interest or narrow in on the perfect product. Our related pins surface is powered by our recommendation models that use computer vision designed to identify products in the Pin and show other relevant organic or ads content that the user might find valuable to their inspiration to action journey.

Boards: Users save and organize Pins onto virtual “boards.” Boards often are labeled with topical categories like “Hawaiian vacation,” “spring outfits” or “living room furniture” and are a collection of Pins that help users organize the vast amount of visual content that they interact with on the platform.

How we monetize the inspiration to action journey:

Our Flywheel

Our users often come to the platform to get inspiration for many of life’s moments, which can lead to discovering new products and brands. As a result, commercial content from brands, retailers and advertisers is central to Pinterest. We believe that in-market consumers on Pinterest tend to be early in their journey toward a purchase decision and do not yet know exactly what they want to purchase. Accordingly, we believe that they are open to discovering new products and brands on Pinterest rather than merely navigating to brands they already know, as is common on traditional search engines and e-commerce platforms. This creates a unique flywheel where relevant ads can not only enhance the user experience but also drive more value for advertisers in the form of increased views, clicks and conversions.

Our Advertising System

Ad Formats

We have a number of advertising products to help advertisers meet users across the full funnel, from upper funnel brand advertising to lower funnel performance advertising. Many of our ad formats can be leveraged by advertisers across upper and lower funnel objectives. Additionally, many of these formats are enabled with mobile deep links and/or direct link capabilities for a seamless, one-click handoff from an ad to the advertiser’s mobile app or webpage, and increasingly, in-app purchase experiences.

•Standard ad: A static image used to showcase content in a simple vertical image format.

•Video ad: Used by advertisers to capture attention and tell a story with a visually engaging format.

•Shopping ad: Used by advertisers who wish to promote specific products in their catalogs to reach users who are deciding what to buy.

•Carousel ad: Multiple static images or videos in one carousel, used by advertisers to showcase more than one image or video at a time.

•Collection ad: Used by advertisers to display products in action with a hybrid format that mixes lifestyle imagery and video with featured products.

•Interactive ad: Used by advertisers to engage with their users through interactive formats.

•Premier Spotlight ad: Used by advertisers to showcase their latest product launch or seasonal moments with exclusive placements on the Pinterest Home Feed and search page.

•Idea ad: Used by advertisers to tell a story that inspires their audience and encourages action.

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Ad Auction

The vast majority of our advertisers buy ads through an auction-based system. Our ad auction allows us to serve ads to users at relevant moments while optimizing business outcomes for advertisers.

We offer ads across both the upper and lower funnel. Upper funnel “brand” revenue is billed when an advertiser optimizes an ad campaign around “brand” objectives like impressions ("CPM") or video views ("CPV"). Lower funnel revenue is billed when an advertiser optimizes an ad campaign around “performance” objectives like clicks ("CPC"), actions (“CPA”) or conversion events ("oCPM"), such as a checkout or add-to-cart.

Our auction system selects the best ad for each available ad impression, based on the likelihood of a desired action occurring and how much that action is worth to advertisers. The likelihood of the action occurring depends on a variety of factors, such as ad relevance and creative quality.

Campaign Management

For most campaigns, advertisers can manage set up, track results and improve performance over time through our Ads Manager or the Pinterest API. To help maximize performance, advertisers can target specific groups of users based on interests, demographics and search keywords. We continue to invest in our AI-enabled campaign solution, Pinterest Performance+, which streamlines setup and drives performance through automated features such as targeting, bidding and creative optimization.

Measurement

Measuring the effectiveness of digital ad spend is a high priority for our advertisers. Our first-party measurement solutions, including our Conversions API and clean rooms, are designed to help advertisers recognize the value of an investment on our platform across a variety of objectives. We also have tools to help advertisers understand our contribution and drivers to conversion, and incremental impact. Advertisers can leverage our leading third-party measurement partners to validate Pinterest’s performance individually and across channels. Additionally, our Conversions API is integrated with other third-party partners to help increase adoption of our measurement tools.

Sales and Marketing

Our go-to-market approach

The Pinterest platform enables a diverse group of advertisers to achieve a wide range of objectives, from building awareness to driving consideration and delivering conversions. We have advertisers across multiple verticals including retail, consumer packaged goods, financial services, technology and entertainment, travel and auto. We serve these advertisers in customized ways depending on their size, sophistication and objectives across the full funnel. The majority of our advertisers utilize our Ads Manager platform to initiate and manage their campaigns. We also have a global sales force presence who work directly with advertisers and ad agencies to provide additional support through the campaign management cycle. In some geographies, we work with other third parties to support our sales efforts.

Marketing

We grow our global user base organically through the strength of our global brand, the utility of our service and unpaid traffic from search engines. In addition, we use paid marketing to grow and retain our user base, build brand awareness and attract advertisers through business marketing and scaled education tools for optimizing campaigns on our platform.

Our technology innovation

We believe we have one of the largest image-rich data sets ever assembled. Using our proprietary AI technology and computer vision, we can leverage our data sets to analyze trends, understand intent and predict consumer behavior at a massive scale to help serve personalized and relevant recommendations for users and improved ads delivery for our

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customers. We aim to continue innovating on our industry-leading work across AI to deepen our foothold in visual search and discovery.

Our competition

We primarily compete with consumer internet companies that are either tools (search, ecommerce) or media (newsfeeds, video, social networks), particularly ones focused on advertising. Competitors such as Amazon, Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads and MetaAI), Google (including Gemini, Lens and YouTube), OpenAI (including ChatGPT), Snap, Reddit, TikTok and X, many of which are larger and have significantly greater financial and human resources, offer users engaging content and commerce opportunities through similar technology or products to ours. We remain focused on emerging competition as well.

We face competition across almost every aspect of our business. We compete to attract, engage and retain users and their time and attention. We also compete with other platforms to attract, retain and grow our base of creators and publishers. We also compete for advertisers and advertising revenue across a variety of formats and goals, which depends on our ability to deliver compelling returns on investment. Finally, we compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, particularly people with expertise in computer vision, AI and machine learning.

Intellectual property

Our success is tied in part to our ability to protect our intellectual property and key technological innovations. We rely on a combination of federal, state and common-law rights in the United States and rights under the laws of other countries, as well as contractual restrictions, to protect our intellectual property and other proprietary rights. We rely on a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, domain names and other intellectual property rights to help protect our brand and proprietary technologies. In addition, we generally enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with other third parties, in order to limit access to, and disclosure and use of, our confidential information and proprietary technology and to preserve our rights thereto.

As of December 31, 2025, we had approximately 400 issued patents and pending patent applications in the United States and foreign countries relating to aspects of our actual or contemplated operations and technologies. We also had over 660 registered trademarks and trademark applications in the United States and foreign countries, including our “Pinterest” name and related logos.

We are also dependent on third-party content, technology and intellectual property in connection with our business.

We are presently involved in intellectual property litigation and expect to continue to face allegations from third parties, including our competitors and “non-practicing entities,” that we have infringed or otherwise violated their intellectual property rights.

For additional information on risks relating to intellectual property, please see the sections titled “Risk Factors” and “—Legal Proceedings.”

Government regulation

We are subject to many U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations that involve matters central to our business, including laws and regulations that involve data privacy and data protection, intellectual property (including copyright and patent laws), content moderation, teen safety, rights of publicity, AI, advertising, marketing, health and safety, competition, protection of minors, consumer protection, taxation, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering and corruption, economic or other trade prohibitions or sanctions or securities law compliance. Our business may also be affected by the adoption of any new or existing laws or regulations or changes in laws or regulations that adversely affect the growth, popularity or use of the internet, or that significantly restrict or impose conditions on our ability to collect, store, augment, analyze, use and share data or increase consumer notice or consent requirements before a company can utilize cookies or other tracking technologies or that increase the liability of content platforms like us. Many relevant laws and regulations are still evolving and may be interpreted, applied, created or amended in a manner that could harm our

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business, and new laws and regulations may be enacted, including in connection with the restriction or prohibition of certain content or business activities.

We rely on a variety of statutory and common-law frameworks and defenses relevant to the content available on our service, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”) and the fair-use doctrine in the United States, and the Digital Services Act (“DSA” ) and EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market ("EU Copyright Directive") in the European Union. Additional new and pending legislation in the U.S. and around the world may impose additional obligations or risk on us associated with content uploaded by users to our platform.

We receive, process, store, use and share data, some of which contains personal information. We are therefore subject to U.S. federal, state, local and foreign laws and regulations regarding data privacy and the collection, storage, sharing, use, processing, disclosure and protection of personal information and other data from users, employees or business partners, including the General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR"), the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (“CCPA”), the Florida Digital Bill of Rights, and other similar state laws that have taken effect or may take effect in 2026. These laws expand the rights of individuals to control how their personal data is processed, collected, used and shared, create new regulatory and operational requirements for processing personal data, increase requirements for security and confidentiality and provide for significant penalties for non-compliance, in some cases including a private right of action. There are also a number of legislative proposals recently enacted or pending concerning content moderation, safety, transparency, and access, as well as data protection that could affect us. These and other laws and regulations that may be enacted, or new interpretation of existing laws and regulations, may require us to modify our data processing practices and policies and to incur substantial costs in order to comply.

Government authorities outside the United States may also seek to restrict access to or block our service, prohibit or block the hosting of certain content available through our service or impose other restrictions that may affect the accessibility or usability of our service in that country for a period of time or even indefinitely. For example, access to our service has been or is currently restricted in whole or in part in certain countries. In addition, some countries have enacted laws that allow websites to be blocked for hosting certain types of content or may require websites to remove certain restricted content.

For additional information, see the sections titled “Risk Factors” and “—Legal Proceedings.”

Seasonality

We have historically experienced seasonality in monthly active user growth, monetization on our platform and free cash flow. Historically, we have had lower sequential user growth in the second quarter. Industry advertising spend tends to be strongest in the fourth quarter resulting in higher revenue in the fourth quarter, and free cash flow is historically higher in the first quarter as we collect on the fourth quarter's higher revenue. We expect this seasonality to continue.

Talent management and development

In order to fulfill our mission of bringing everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, we strive to attract and retain top talent. To attract and retain great talent, we strive to create opportunities for our employees to grow and develop in their careers, supported by competitive compensation, benefits and health and wellness programs, and by programs that build connections between our employees and their communities. As of December 31, 2025, we had 5,265 full-time employees.

Inclusion and belonging

We strive to create an inclusive workplace where employees are encouraged and empowered to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day. We seek for and respect a wide range of experiences and perspectives across our Board of Directors, leadership and employee base, which we believe helps us create a more inclusive and global product.

Employee health, safety and benefits

The success of our business is fundamentally tied to the well-being of our people. We are committed to the health, safety and wellness of our employees. We provide our employees and their families with access to a variety of flexible and convenient health and wellness programs that support their physical and mental health by providing tools and resources to help them improve or maintain their health. We also have a flexible work model that provides employees in roles that can

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be performed from anywhere the autonomy to live and work flexibly within their country or region, while prioritizing intentional in-person collaboration at our offices.

We provide robust compensation and benefits programs to help meet the needs of our employees and their families. In addition to salaries, these programs (which vary by country/region) include equity awards, sales incentive programs for eligible employees, a 401(k) Plan with Company matching, healthcare and insurance benefits, health savings and flexible spending accounts, flexible paid time off, family leave and family care support, flexible work schedules, employee assistance programs and charitable donation matching, among many others. We regularly review and update our compensation and benefits programs as needed to remain competitive with market compensation. Because every family is unique, we offer additional benefits to parents and caregivers with newborns in neonatal intensive care, adoptive parents and people experiencing miscarriage, and also offer fertility benefits globally. To promote financial wellbeing, we offer money management education, financial planning and investment services. To promote emotional wellbeing, we offer free access to mental health and wellbeing tools like Lyra and Calm.

Learning and development

We help our employees create a career that is inspiring, impactful and ultimately time well spent. We have programs for open and ongoing conversation towards career growth goals both long term and short term. We also have workshops dedicated to learning new skills and developing an employee’s career. We set aside a dedicated personal learning and development budget for every employee.

Corporate information

Our principal executive offices are located at 651 Brannan Street, San Francisco, California 94107, and our telephone number is (415) 762-7100. Our Class A common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “PINS.”

Available information

Our website is located at www.pinterest.com, and our investor relations website is located at http://investor.pinterestinc.com/. Copies of our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act, are available, free of charge, on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after we file such material electronically with or furnish it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. The SEC also maintains a website that contains our SEC filings. The address of the site is www.sec.gov. We use our http://investor.pinterestinc.com/ and www.pinterest.com websites as a means of disclosing material nonpublic information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD of the Exchange Act.

The contents of our websites are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any references to our websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.