A：Pinterest has transformed from a platform of window shopping to an AI-powered visual first shopping assistant, aiming to provide a joyful and seamless user experience while enabling users to take action. The company has built a strong relationship with users and advertisers, with nearly half of users coming directly to the mobile app and 600 million monthly active users, marking 9 straight quarters of record highs, with particular strength in Gen Z. The company has also reached 103 million users in the US and Canada, and 1% of reported users are logged in, providing valuable intent signals. The growth of queries on the platform, especially visual search, and performance ads platforms are contributing to a stronger financial performance.

A：Pinterest's user base is growing with 600 million monthly active users, marking 9 consecutive quarters of record highs, and a significant increase in its largest and fastest-growing cohort, Gen Z, which comprises over 50% of the user base. This demographic represents the next generation of users and shoppers and is particularly significant for its size and growth rate, as well as for its commercial potential as makers, content creators, and an attractive audience for advertisers.

A：Visual search has become a significant part of user engagement on Pinterest, with a 44% year-over-year growth in queries related to visual search features in Q3. This trend helped elevate the relevance of shopping recommendations and drove more engagement towards visual search, an area where the company sees a distinct competitive advantage. The growth is aligned with the user experience of visual inspiration and discovery expected from Pinterest, which is fueling the company's financial performance.

A：The performance of the advertising platform on Pinterest has seen substantial growth, with an increase of 40% year over year in outbound clicks to advertisers in Q3 and a fivefold increase over the last three years. The platform has achieved 5% to 10% share of total ad spend for major advertisers and is expanding its share of wallet with large advertisers while also experiencing growth with smaller mid-market advertisers through AI-driven automation. The performance budgets and international markets present clear opportunities for monetization and growth.

A：AI is central to the Pinterest experience, continuously working in the background to understand user preferences and curate personalized recommendations. It proactively predicts what users will love next, providing a seamless and individualized shopping experience. This has made Pinterest an AI-powered shopping assistant for its 600 million monthly active users. The AI uses first-party signals from user curations and purchases to recommend relevant content and creates a feedback loop that further enhances personalization.

A：To enhance visual discovery and user engagement, Pinterest introduced multimodal search, which allows users to refine searches using both image and text inputs. The new feature includes a proprietary multimodal model trained on Pinterest's vast and unique dataset, which is more effective at identifying relevant content. Additionally, the company is testing the launch of the new Pinterest Assistant, a voice-activated conversational AI that moves beyond simple text inputs to help users with complex queries and discover shoppable products, capturing more nuanced commercial intent.

A：AI is being integrated into boards to make them more inspirational and assist users in moving seamlessly from discovery to decision. The upcoming feature, 'Boards Made for You,' will bring curated collections of timely and personalized content to users' home feeds, aiming to drive frequent visitation and introduce relevant shopping recommendations. Also, as part of the holiday market effort, new expert curated gift guides are being launched to feature gift ideas for various categories, further assisting users in their shopping decisions.

A：The company recently launched 'Top of Search ads,' which are currently in beta and appear within the top 10 search results and in related pins to ensure visibility and attract new users. Another format is 'Where to buy links,' which surface multiple in-stock retailer options directly from an ad, complemented by 'Local inventory ads,' which display real-time prices for in-stock items within a shopper's local radius.

A：The partnership with Instacart has enabled Pinterest ads to become directly shoppable via Instacart, allowing users to complete a purchase in just a few clicks, enhancing the seamless shopping experience across various categories.

A：'Performance Plus' has been a significant performance driver for advertisers, with a 24% higher conversion lift for retail advertisers compared to those spending only on traditional campaigns. It has been particularly well-received by mid-market and smaller advertisers, who have seen a 12% higher monthly growth rate in spend on Pinterest post-adoption. The tool offers a range of features to boost campaign performance with AI-driven ad products and is expected to continue driving growth for advertisers.

A：The 'Performance Plus' suite introduced 'Performance Plus ROAS bidding,' which provides granular bidding functionality and optimizes for conversion value. This feature benefits advertisers with large catalogs at varying price points by offering more precise control over ad spending. Enhanced reporting was also launched to provide detailed audience breakdowns to supplement performance metrics.

A：The company's international monetization strategy involves scaling proven playbooks across Europe and the rest of the world, integrating deeply with the local advertising ecosystem, and using a hybrid model that blends direct sales forces with resellers and ad tech partners. This strategy is beginning to pay off as it unlocks growth opportunities and international monetization rates are improving, evidenced by the growing share of international revenue from shopping ads.

A：The company is expanding its presence in international markets by focusing on direct relationships with advertisers and agencies, integrating with marketing tech partners, and implementing a hybrid sales model that varies by market. This approach helps to export successful strategies from the U.S. while adapting them to local contexts, as illustrated by Pandora's success in leveraging the company's lower funnel playbook.

A：Recent progress for international revenue includes a significant growth in the share of revenue from shopping ads, reaching 30% in Q3, and revenue growth in Europe and the rest of the world growing over two times faster than their respective regional overall revenue growth. The company sees more opportunities to activate and grow its share of wallet with international advertisers, particularly in Europe and the rest of the world, where it remains underpenetrated.

A：The company's user growth in the third quarter was positive, with global monthly active users (MAUs) increasing 12% to 600 million. All geographic regions showed user growth, with the U.S. and Canada growing 4%, Europe growing 8%, and the rest of the world growing 16%. The company's engagement metrics also improved, with queries, board creations, and quicks to advertisers increasing faster than users, indicating deeper engagement per user.

A：In Q3, the cost of revenue was $206 million, up 13% year over year and up 5% versus Q2. Non GAAP operating expense was $543 million, with a 15% increase attributed to investments in sales and marketing and R&D. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $306 million, a margin of 29%, with an expansion of 170 basis points versus Q3 last year, leading to Q3 free cash flow of $318 million.

A：The capital allocation framework aims to invest in product and technology innovation, balance sheet optimization, preserving flexibility for M&A, and managing dilution. In Q3, to mitigate dilution from employees' stock-based compensation, $199 million was allocated towards share repurchases and $115 million towards net share settlement of equity awards, resulting in fully diluted share count being roughly flat year over year.

A：For Q4, the revenue is expected to be in the range of $1 billion to $1.338 billion, representing 14% to 16% growth year over year. The guidance assumes an impact of foreign exchange to be approximately a one-point tailwind based on current spot rates. Q4 2025 adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $533 million to $558 million. Non GAAP cost of revenue is expected to grow sequentially from Q3 by high single digits percent, and the primary area of investment will continue to be headcount growth within R&D for AI and other product initiatives, as well as the global sales team. The Q4 Adjusted EBITDA guidance confirms continued margin expansion in the second half of 2025, although it will be lower than the first half due to continued investment in revenue driving initiatives.

A：The strength of the platform has been attributed to 9 straight quarters of record high users, with shopping playing a central role in the resurgence of the platform. The company has effectively become an AI-driven shopping assistant, with the core being the personalization of recommendations without users having to ask, as evidenced by the Pinterest Assistant that was announced.

A：The strategies for advancing the AI-driven shopping experience include continuing to focus on the visual-first experience while incorporating voice and AI at the forefront. The aim is to guide users through the decision-making journey, with a clear focus on delivering great buying experiences for users, such as the push-button buying with Amazon linked accounts. The company plans to apply AI in a way that helps users progress further down the commercial journey every time they return to the app.

A：The company plans to leverage AI by aligning it with monetization efforts to ensure highly commercial search results while managing costs effectively. They have proprietary and compact models that perform well and are constantly testing leading off-the-shelf proprietary models against open-source models. Early testing indicates significant cost reductions using fine-tuned open-source models with comparable performance, which suggests that open-source models can be applied to more use cases at a lower cost than larger model providers.

A：The outlook for Q4 is for revenue to be in the range of $1 billion to $1.338 billion, with a year-over-year growth rate 1 point lower than Q3 due to continued market uncertainty and the addition of a new tariff impacting the home furnishings category. However, the company remains confident in achieving mid to high teens revenue growth targets over the medium and long term and sees momentum in emerging verticals, small and mid-market advertisers, and international opportunities as contributing factors.

A：Despite an environment where some of the largest retailers have pulled back on spending across the industry, due to navigating tariff-related margin pressure, the company grew by 17%. This pullback notably affects large retailers, and the company has more exposure to this segment due to its focus on shopping.

A：As advertisers adopt AI-driven platforms, there is a next level of optimization where bidding is becoming more aligned with advertisers' measurement sources of truth and more events leading up to a conversion are being incorporated. The company began this journey earlier this year with Roas-based bidding, resulting in a 100% increase in shopping SKUs with paid ad impressions across the platform in Q3 driven entirely by Roas bidding adopters.

A：The company sees meaningful potential to expand further into AI-based optimization of other events valued by advertisers and their measurement sources of truth. They are testing this with some of their largest partners and have seen good early results. This alignment of AI bidding with the advertiser's measurement source of truth is market-expanding and should benefit the company in future quarters as they continue to roll out features that are early on their platform.

A：Clicks to advertisers increased 40% in Q3, and quick to advertisers out-paced revenue and all of the company's reported geographies. This indicates that while there is progress, there is more work to be done to properly credit the performance for these clicks.

A：The company sees AI-generated content as a big tailwind for their platform and they are embracing it. They are addressing content quality through their recommender systems and by giving users choice in what they want to see. They are also leveraging AI-generated content while allowing users to provide direct feedback if they want to see less AI-driven content.

A：The company does not have a precise ability to catch 100% of what is AI generated but uses industry-level tags, metadata, and other indicators to get a sense of AI-generated content. Their approach is to not show no content as AI-generated, acknowledging that the ability to precisely spot it is not perfect for any platform. Over time, they expect nearly every piece of content to have been edited by AI in some form and it will come down to content recommendation and content quality.

A：The company's strategy has been very consistent, with first-party ad demand being the primary driver of growth and third-party demand complementing and rounding out their auction. With respect to Magni, the company is still working through integration tests and is in the early days of testing. They are focusing on bringing on new sources of demand on the platform and are exploring how their high-intent audience could be valuable to programmatic budget pools beyond their own platform.