Pinterest Strategy for Food Creators in 2026 with Kate Ahl

Disclaimer: this transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the biggest mindset shifts I see successful food creators make is this. They stop thinking only about traffic and they start thinking about product because traffic is great, but real leverage comes when you get good at selling something. You own recipes, meal plans, a membership, a system that actually helps people. The problem is that creating a product is really hard. You have to figure out the tech, the structure, the payments, the delivery, and honestly, that’s where a lot of really great ideas die. That’s why I want to tell you about Member Kitchens. Member Kitchens makes it incredibly easy for food creators to sell recipes and meal plans at scale without having to build everything from scratch. You don’t need to be a developer. You don’t have to have a complicated setup. They’ve already built the infrastructure for you. You bring what you’re great at, which is creating food content your audience loves, and Member Kitchens handles the heavy lifting of turning that into a real sellable product. And if you’ve ever thought, I know I should have a product, I just don’t know where to start, then this is your starting point. You can check it out at memberkitchens.com and start thinking beyond traffic and toward building something that actually grows with you.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Kate all from Simple Pin Media. Pinterest has changed a lot in the last year and food creators are feeling it with the rise of AI generated content, also known as AI slop. Many established food bloggers have seen real traffic declines, even though newer creators are still finding some success on the platform. In this episode, Kate breaks down what’s really happening on Pinterest right now, and we talk about how AI has impacted the platform, whether Pinterest still offers a strong ROI for food creators and what strategies might actually work in 2026. Kate also shares practical actionable advice for using Pinterest more intentionally building trust with users and showing Pinterest in your audience so there’s a real human behind your content. If you’ve been wondering whether Pinterest is still worth your time, you’re definitely going to want to give this episode a listen. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Kate, welcome back to the podcast.

Kate Ahl: Thanks so much for having me back.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like we’re old friend talking to an old friend here. We’ve known each other for a long time and these are some of my favorite conversations to have on the podcast. It’s somebody that I love talking to and also somebody who has deep expertise in a certain area. That area for you is Pinterest. You’ve been doing this a similar amount of time to us decade plus, and so you really know the world of Pinterest, but you also know the world of content creators because your business, simple Pin Media works with content creators. Give us a quick high level overview for those who aren’t familiar of what it is that you do. And then we’re going to be talking about Pinterest in 2026.

Kate Ahl: So we have our agency, which is Simple Pin Media, so we manage Pinterest client accounts both on organic and ads, but then we also have a teaching arm where I do a lot of education around just how to get started or how to think about Pinterest. And I like to think of myself as we are aware that Pinterest is only a small slice of the pie, but we want whatever information we’re giving you to be good enough and accurate to where you can leverage that slice of the pie well for your business. And we also stay on top of things, and I’m a verified educator with Pinterest, so we bring kind of all that to the table.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I think I often think about and talk about with people this idea that you talk about, hey, small slice of the pie, but really with any business, what it is is just a bunch of slices that make up the pie. And what our job is as content creators is to think strategically around what are all of the different places that we could be publishing content to that we could be spending our time with, and then how do we strategically make decisions around investing either dollars or time into those platforms in order to get a return on that? And if you find a thousand different ways to get traffic could be a new piece of content. It could be 10 different places that you’re publishing that content. It could be an old piece of content that you’re publishing. Again, if you find a thousand different ways, which sounds like a lot, but over a year maybe it’s not, and each of those maybe gets you a thousand page views, 2000 page views, suddenly what you have is a $50,000, a hundred thousand dollars business.

Similarly, if you find a thousand ways that you can make a thousand dollars, you have a million dollar business. And so all that to say, one of the things that we need to do as content creators is to find those opportunities to understand how those platforms work, to think about how our content fits into those platforms, and then to set up some system or process to make sure as we’re creating new content or republishing older content that it gets in front of that audience there. So Pinterest to me is one of those platforms that is and continues to be really important, but there’s also been a lot that has changed with it recently. So talk to me about the last year. What has been the vibe with Pinterest over the last year?

Kate Ahl: Well, the vibe, I would say, if we had one word to sum it up, that is unfortunately like AI slop and it seems to be the platform that’s gotten hit the hardest with this. And so that’s affected content creators so much because it is a really great platform for driving traffic to your website for getting exposures for your recipes. A lot of people would go there to menu plan. And so we started to hear from users, I don’t know if this is legit, the chef has a picture with six fingers and doesn’t make sense.

Bjork Ostrom: There was a, or it looks like maybe everything about it. There is no AI weird finger thing, but it is just that little bit of that, wait a minute, that doesn’t look human.

Kate Ahl: Yes, it doesn’t look like a human created that and then shot it with a camera. So I feel like in the last year they’ve just had this tension between a flood of AI slop and how that has affected creators. And so it still can be a really great platform, but I just think we’re at this weird inflection point where at any platform when there’s a small crack that kind of nefarious actors can of slide in there, they’ll take it. Right. And we’ve seen that with Google too as well over the years.

Bjork Ostrom: Marketers ruin everything.

Kate Ahl: I know, right? It’s true. So I think that’s where I would say sums up kind of the last difficulties of Pinterest, especially for established creators that have seen a lot of their recipes be overtaken by this. But at the same time, we’ve seen some new creators that are entering Pinterest and having really good success, but they don’t have a lot of the history on the platform. So it’s a little tough there. Their

Bjork Ostrom: Baseline is zero,

Whereas a creator who’s been publishing to Pinterest for 10 years has a different baseline and if they see their new reality from a traffic engagement growth perspective is substantially below that, it’s discouraging. If you’re a new creator, you start publishing content, your baseline is zero, it’s potentially encouraging. You’re like, wait, I got some traffic. I’m starting to get some momentum here. It’s a different mindset with the idea of AI slop. So can you talk about specifically how that’s showing up on the platform? So I’m a user, I don’t know Pinterest, I’m getting on the platform. What is that like for me from an experience perspective when I’m looking through the content that is on Pinterest and even percentage wise, do we know how much is AI versus actual human created content?

Kate Ahl: We don’t know. We’ve heard some numbers from other organizations that have done kind of their own third party testing that it’s somewhere around like 60 to 70%. That always feels pretty high to me. But then actually when I open up my own account and I’m looking for things like backyard landscaping, a lot of it is ai, and I’m like, I can’t actually do that. A human did create that backyard. So we’re seeing a lot in the design space, even in the beauty space, even in the food space, it’s kind of infiltrated everywhere to where I would think if I go through, it’s probably every third or fourth pin that is probably ai. And then you match that with a lot of ads on the platform, which do look native, but you get a very frustrating experience because then it’s like one or two out of those five or six really are real and legit. And then there’s some that we don’t know. Some of the AI is super easy to spot, but then some of it is like you really have to dig in, go to the website, and then when you feel very generic reading, then you’re like, oh, this isn’t a legit creator,

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s getting better and better. I’m finding for myself that I’m running into AI content. I shared this before we hit record. I sent a video to Lindsay the other day and she’s like, oh, it’s ai. I was like, oh no, I am that guy. I’m the AI forwarding video guy now and I’m an internet person.

Kate Ahl: Yes, totally.

Bjork Ostrom: And I was like, oh, this is, I think some people probably have an extreme filtering mechanism where they’re looking at everything and being able to decipher ai, not ai,

But probably less and less people are going to be less capable of deciphering whether something is real or not. And when you think of a platform like Pinterest, which is very, it’s not entertainment, it’s functional in that people are going there to try and understand, in your case, how do you do a backyard remodel? What are some ways that people have done that looking for inspiration from it? How do you get a great chicken parm recipe? I want to go and find some inspiration there because I want to make that this week. Are you seeing that or is it your belief then that the actual platform itself is impacted by that? Or in Pinterest to some degree you’re able to see the data, how much revenue they’re making. I don’t know how much they report now that they’re a public company or is it kind of like there’s been this huge shift to AI content, but does Pinterest care? Because if people are continuing to use the platform, engage with the platform, spend time on the platform, click on ads, one might argue that Pinterest doesn’t care if it’s AI created or human created as long as their numbers look good. Do you know, or do you have any sense from Pinterest what that looks like on their side and how many alarms are going off there in order to try and fix the problem?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, I would say in the team that I meet with, which obviously what I’m about to say is representative of me of not of Pinterest, but one of the things that we have conversations around is giving them feedback about how to combat this. And at every turn when we have said we want filters, we want the user to have a filter to be able to turn off ai. So then anything that is labeled with AI modified will then be excluded. Obviously there’s ways that people can get around this and pull the coding and it’ll still get through the filter, but one of the things we have seen is that at every point when we present them with something, they do respond. They don’t want this as well because they’re looking for a really good user experience. Now, I will say this though is right at this time that all of this is happening.

Pinterest is heavily investing in Gen Z, they’re seeing Gen Z use their platform more. They’re aging down in social, they’re really aiming on positivity more so than aiming on the AI slot piece and incorporating what they call as an AI shopping assistant. So in the last year we’ve seen that push and we’ve also seen this conversation around Pinterest being a shopping platform. So this elevation of products and kind of content going to the background. We’ve also seen home decor overtake the top niche on Pinterest where food used to be the top niche food is dropped underneath. So I think with all of these things, I would say Pinterest cares about not having AI slap on their platform, but if you have an algorithm that’s based on engagement and saves and things like that and people are engaging with this content, maybe they don’t know, then it’s hard. You have this elevation of this content, whereas the other stuff is not being elevated. So it’s trying to figure out how to navigate the algorithm and all of that. But like I said, we’re also starting to have a different conversation, especially from the leadership around how Pinterest is positioning itself.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more? So that point is really interesting to me that you talked about K Gen Z. That makes sense focusing on a little bit of a younger audience. I think traditionally you’d think of Pinterest as skewing with an older demographic of people who are maybe looking for home remodel or more disposable income, whatever it might be. And then you said home decor, overtaking food as the number one product category, but also within home decor. It sounds like there’s still the issue of AI slop. Is there a way that you are seeing the home decor show up in a genuine way or is that home decor inclusive of ai?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, I would say they’re struggling with some of the same things that food creators are struggling with, where they were starting to talk to more designers who are maybe getting clients sharing information from Pinterest and saying, I want this to be done in my house or whatever, and they’re like, well, it can’t, or hairdressers or people that I’ve worked with who do photography or makeup, they say, people will come to me with these images from Pinterest and they’re not real. I can’t make you look like that. So it’s this hard thing where the user base, I think to your point, they are pursuing Gen Z, but millennial and Gen X and even boomer hold the purse strings, so they’re buying a lot of stuff. So it almost feels like we’re in this weird identity crisis and you’ve got a big whole bunch of AI thrown in.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What does that look like then? Let’s say you are pinch of yum, you’re a food creator. Pinterest is still an important platform. We get traffic from Pinterest and then some of the highest value traffic in terms of RPM. So if you look at that compared to another social platform like Facebook for sure, but even Google search traffic, each view is worth more that comes from Pinterest, but it’s getting harder and harder to get those views. Pinterest traffic is down year over year, and before that was down year over year. What then do you do as a food creator? What is this strategy? And maybe you could take the approach for somebody who has been doing it for a long time, like ourselves or from somebody who’s starting new and would be curious if those are two different strategies and two different approaches that you’d take.

Kate Ahl: Yeah, definitely very two different approaches. So let’s take the established food creator who has been on Pinterest for a long time. They’re seeing their traffic go down. I think, and you and I had this conversation a month ago about where the ROI is and what the data tells you because what we find is that in the established food bloggers, there’s a wide variety of traffic that’s happening for them. For some maybe they’re really wiped out, maybe AI slop took over their search results and they’re not getting as much anymore, so they’re going to have to evaluate, is Pinterest still a really effective marketing arm for my business? But then there’s those who are still doing well, but maybe they’re not as well as they used to. So then it becomes an ROI conversation of dollars and cents. Are you still making enough money? Are you still driving traffic to your website?

Do they still feel like really qualified leads? If yes, then we go into how you’re positioning your content. What content is getting the most clicks? Do you need to change up some of the language that you’re using? Maybe you used to use things like clean eating before, whereas now high protein is going to be more of a buzzword. Is there certain trends on Pinterest that you can leverage as well? They come out with their Pinterest predicts every single year, which is essentially what they’re saying. This will trend in 2026. We have lots of clients that look at that list and say, okay, I’m going to create content around this because Pinterest is my highest traffic driver. And if cabbage is in fact, it is one of the things in 2026, whereas pickles was 2025, if cabbage is there, then I could create content around cabbage.

Used a lot of those keywords in order to get the boost if it fits within your vertical. If you’re a barbecue person, you don’t suddenly want to start talking about cabbage just because Pinterest says that. So then for the new people who are starting on Pinterest, it’s kind of like you have a full runway to experiment, to try things to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and you’re going to give Pinterest six to nine months before you could really make a decision of whether or not it’s going to work for you. But if I were in that person’s shoes and I knew what I wanted to cook or what I wanted to talk about, I would go look at what Pinterest is offering me in the way of predictions or content calendars and start to mess around and create there. And I think also you have a lot of different options to choose from when it comes to marketing, right? Google has changed and SEO and a IO and all of that. If you’re going to focus on Pinterest, I would say Do it. Well give it a hundred percent, don’t give it 50%. And really get your focus on your people. Try not to listen to the voices of people who are established. They may be a little salty, a little frustrated, but there is a lot of great opportunity for new content creators on Pinterest.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say give it a hundred percent, what does that look like? Practically speaking?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, so I would say number one is learning how to do keyword research on Pinterest and understanding where to put keywords so that whatever you’re putting on the platform, you’re not just writing a lame sentence, you are writing with intention. So maybe that’s a better word than go a hundred percent. It’s like be intentional about the actions that you’re taking when it comes to keywords and when it comes to your images, play around with different formats with your images. And if you can dial in those two things, the whole number of pins per day really doesn’t matter because then you’re really optimizing for the image piece, that connection with the end user. And then the algorithm piece, which is the keywords,

Bjork Ostrom: The description. We talk about this idea that Pinterest is a search engine. A lot of the people who are using Pinterest are using it to search for a thing, and that’s why your description of the pin is important because that helps inform what that piece of content is about. Would you have advice on those two specific pieces, the image and the description being that those are probably the two most important components of what makes up a pin?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, a hundred percent. Because people on Pinterest don’t read. They’re only looking at the image. So if you have a really strong picture and then you have really strong copy, we call it like pin copy, where it’s just three to four words. It’s not a ton of words, but it’s enough to get them curious on

Bjork Ostrom: The image or in the description, on the

Kate Ahl: Image, on the image, and to give them context because Pinterest has visual search. And so it’ll read the words on the image and it will read what’s in the image in order to categorize it with other content. And so being really intentional asking, well, here’s a workflow that I would do. I am not good at images, so I’m not even going to say that I’m amazing. But if I was right,

I would go to Pinterest and I would actually search what it is my recipe is, and then I would search the other images and I would just look at what catches my eye. So if there are certain things that stand out to you and you’re like, Ooh, I like this, I like this, I would pull that into my image and I would use some of that. And then knowing that I’ve just searched it, I would look at the descriptions in those, what are the keywords that people are using? And then I would go back to Pinterest and I would look at typing in those keywords into the search bar and see what comes up. So now in just your 10 minute search, you have an idea of what your image might look like and you have an idea of what the keywords might be so that you go back to your computer, go to Canva, build your whole image, and then when you upload it to Pinterest, you can add a pin title, a pin description, and your URL now you’re good to go. You can pin it to your board that it closely matches. So if we’re talking about breakfast, you would pin it to a board that talks about breakfast, and then you rinse and repeat that process and then you can see over the months that you’re doing it, what got engagement, what didn’t get engagement, what got engagement, do more of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. This is talking about image in a description. There also is the ability to post videos. Is that something that you’re seeing traction with?

Kate Ahl: Okay, so here’s the thing with video is I just shared, we have a new small community that we have for just conversation. I call it thoughtful discussion on Pinterest. And I shared something around video and Pinterest had shared in this article that there’s a billion views of video a day, and it’s like the fastest saved pin format, which I feel is a phrase they use. So I’m a little side eyeing that.

And so people were commenting, our video really working, and I think the answer is for some people they are, for some people they are not. And there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason. It’s simply if you start video, which is less than a minute, it’s not long form. In fact, a lot of what we do even at Simple Pin is we take a short form video and we lead it straight to YouTube or we lead it straight to the website. So we kind of do both. Sometimes it gets engagement and then other times it doesn’t. I really wish there was a good method to be like X, Y, Z sold, it’s going to work on Pinterest with video. I think they want it to work, but I would say the user who engages the most with video, we’ll see video in their feed. I don’t engage with video. I don’t see it in my feed.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, that makes sense. Have you seen creators who have done really well on Pinterest and have seen that traffic decline and then have recovered from that decline? Or is it primarily is what we’re looking at not having the decline happen as fast as quickly as possible within the context of traffic like that as the metric? I think that in the world of food, one of the things that we will most often prioritize is traffic to your website. Other people, it might be sales. You’re trying to get a product in front of people, but for us that’s primarily the transaction point is traffic. And I think for a lot of other people as well. Have you seen any scenarios like that or is it mostly about preserving the traffic you do have or not having traffic decline as fast by being strategic? What does that look like? Because one of the great advantages you have is insight into lots of different accounts and seeing how people are navigating all the shifts that are happening on Pinterest as a platform.

Kate Ahl: So there’s a few qualifiers. So let’s say we have an established client who is doing a ton of content, they’re keeping up with their consistent rhythm and they’ve seen a decrease, and then maybe they saw a bump in Q4 year over year. Most of them are down. It’s preserving your traffic and it’s kind of waiting for some of that AI slot to settle or be removed or for your rankings to resurface. Then we have people who are longtime established bloggers who saw a decrease in their traffic, but they stopped blogging. They really either burned out or took a break. They come back and you do start to see it climb up again. And I think that’s mostly just because you had that they weren’t doing anything for a chunk of time. And I’ll also say when we play around with the trends, and we work with some of our clients to create content around the Pinterest trends, now this has to be a certain type of client that is not worried about overtaking Google or getting hit by Google because there is that tension for food creators to kind of either serve Pinterest or serve Google. It’s sometimes hard to serve both

Bjork Ostrom: From a resources perspective,

Kate Ahl: You’re going

Bjork Ostrom: To prioritize a certain platform and you only have so many resources whether time or money.

Kate Ahl: And I would also say fear on some level, even having a conversations with some of our clients, they will not rock the Google boat. And so if there’s anything to be done as far as either creating new content, we know this five pillar posts do really well on Google and Pinterest maybe create a spinoff, they’re very hesitant to do it, afraid they don’t

Bjork Ostrom: Want something that would be duplicate content on their site.

Kate Ahl: A hundred percent.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Kate Ahl: So that’s a little bit of attention for some. So I would say there’s multiple qualifiers in what can help rise back up, but when do leverage trends, we do see a bump.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. One of the things that I think about is bets. Everything that we’re doing in life has a version of replacing bets. And especially as an entrepreneur, we’re betting that our time is going to be valuable if we spend it in a certain area that our money’s going to be valuable in a certain area. And when I think of Pinterest as a platform, one of the things that we need to make a decision on is how much are we willing to bet on this as a platform? And it’s always easier to bet on something that’s going up. Bitcoin is going up, the stock market is going up, it’s easier to put your money there if it’s going up, it gets harder if it’s going down. But oftentimes what will happen, Bitcoin goes down, but then it comes back up, the stock market goes down, but then it comes back up. If you had to predict Pinterest predicts, let’s play Kate all predicts. If you had to predict, do you think there will be a moment where it comes back where for creators who continue to show up, who continue to publish on the platform, that they will have momentum leading into a shift that occurs, that results in the type of content that we are creating human forward content as opposed to AI content overtaking coming back and for that shift to come back up? We’ve seen that with Facebook. I feel like in our personal

Arc of being concert creators, it worked really well. You were able to build a following, you could get it in front of a lot of people, and then it was like you flipped a switch and all of your organic reach was compressed and Facebook started to charge in order for pages to get in front of people because they wanted the ad dollars. But now we’re in a season where it’s like, oh, they’re paying content creators and you’re starting to be able to get traffic again. And so there is this shift that happened and for us it was like we kind of ignored it for a long time and now it’s like actually this is a platform that we’re going to focus on a little bit more.

Kate Ahl: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that look like for Pinterest? And if you had to place a bet, if you had to predict the future, what would your prediction be?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I would say if I had to predict, I think the next year is going to be a settling point of where Pinterest is at with AI and how they can reconcile that shopping AI piece.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about the shopping component of

Kate Ahl: That? So Pinterest is always said, we are the great informer of purchases. They have a lot of stats behind it. They’ll say, you find it on Pinterest, you’ll go buy it in the store, or you’ll go to the website, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Clothes, DIY

Kate Ahl: Home.

So they want to leverage that even more, but they have a new thing called the AI powered Shopping Assistant. So how they’re positioning themselves is you go to Google, you type something in, you see a bunch of text, but when you go to Pinterest, you don’t exactly know what you’re looking for, which is why text isn’t helpful. So if we have an AI powered shopping assistant, you could say, I’m looking for a pair of jeans, I like this wash, I like this length. Can you help me find it? And then go back and forth with it and say, no, that’s not it. So then it will get to this point where it’s surfacing for you shopping recommendations based on your interaction with it. And if we think about that right now, that’s such a corner of the market that is not really there quite yet. And I think that’s why a couple of weeks ago there was speculation about OpenAI buying Pinterest and there was this whole thing, which turned out not to be true, but it sets them apart. It’s almost like they have this great advantage, but they don’t know how great of advantage they have.

Bjork Ostrom: And the advantage is image-based

Kate Ahl: Shopping. Their whole thing is it’s different here because people will know it when they see it, and no other platform allows you to know it when you see it because it’s all text based.

Bjork Ostrom: So an example in my case would be like I’m trying to figure out casual men’s clothing. I know generally I’m wearing a blue button down, maybe a white shirt. Here’s an example. I know I want to find, I’ve been a tri blend guy. I’m officially just declaring myself, never said this. I’m officially declaring myself as tri blend guy. I don’t like cotton shirts. I have a tri blend. Awesome, but I can’t find, and if anybody knows of one email me or I could use Pinterest to find it.

Kate Ahl: Yeah, can’t, can’t

Bjork Ostrom: Find a good white blanc shirt and I don’t know why that is.

Kate Ahl: Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: So I would go, I kind of know what I want,

Kate Ahl: But I need to see it,

Bjork Ostrom: But I need to see it.

Kate Ahl: And

Bjork Ostrom: So I would go to Pinterest to do that. The interesting thing, it’s like that’s a pretty significant pivot for Pinterest from, or maybe not, maybe it’s just an evolution out of what already happens, which is people are going there and they’re trying to figure out things to buy and using images to inform that decision. I would say where it’s the most significant pivot is in the world of food, if you then become a buying platform, then what does that mean for food creators? And what would your thought be on that? Would the same type of search based conversation based interaction happen on Pinterest, but it would just be around food images?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, I mean it might be. I would say if you are a food content creator that has a line of, I’m thinking of Susie with Mediterranean dish, she has olive oil, she has spices, she has all these pieces, and she’s connected her Shopify store with Pinterest right now. That integration is natural there as well, that if somebody is recipe, they’re looking at a recipe that’s Mediterranean, Pinterest can now surface recommendations of spices to buy are olive oil right there when you’re in the app.

So I know that’s not every food creator is going to be able to source their own spices in olive oil, but I think there’s an opportunity for affiliate marketing there if it comes to products, looking at how quickly people are buying things, if you’re talking about a Dutch oven or bread or something like that. But we don’t have a lot of use cases yet for how that is going to work. Some tagging, especially affiliate tagging, other things like that have been kind of clunky. You can’t do it when you schedule a pin, which makes the whole process that much more bumpy. So I guess I would say that’s one of the things we’re leaning into in 2026 is to see where is e-commerce fit for both creators and shop owners and what does that look like on Pinterest? Will Pinterest drive meaningful traffic on the platform to make purchases or will it live in that space of just being the quote informer that they’ve played before? So I think they’ve been building up to this. If we look at how they’ve stacked their C-suite, there are a lot of Google, Venmo, PayPal, Amazon, like DoorDash, they’re very much leaning into these integrations of shopping transactions. Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And so to what degree does that exist right now versus something that’s been talked about? Could you go to a certain category in Pinterest and start to do this right now?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, a hundred percent. I get more shopping recommendations when I search than I do sometimes content, especially if I’m searching for anything in the fashion space, for sure, I’m going to see it at the top. Food hasn’t so much been impacted by that. I don’t see products in my feed as much, but anything outside of that, birthday parties, kids’ clothing, you name it, you’re going to get a lot of shopping recommendations. And at the top, you can choose between, it doesn’t say content or shopping, but it’s like a little tag versus more content bubbles. So it’s readily available.

Bjork Ostrom: And the bet is that as the world of strictly content for the sake of content that is created in order for the content creator to get traffic and for Pinterest to get eyeballs, as that world shifts and changes and becomes potentially more AI based, probably more AI based, there is a natural dilution that will happen in terms of the value of that type of content. And so then for Pinterest, they’re needing to decide how do we continue to create value in a way that isn’t through AI content creation. It’s not valuable for somebody to create an AI image for a product that doesn’t exist because the purpose is to transact naturally. It has to be real things that people will actually buy. Is that a little bit of the thinking in terms of the evolution of the platform?

Kate Ahl: In fact, I watched this really interesting YouTube video by a really high YouTube, I think it’s Sophia Nygard. She actually has done things on Pinterest before, and she did this whole video of buying Pinterest AI dresses so that she knew how to spot, and she was actually in the whole video. I found it so fascinating. She knew how to spot if the dresses were ai, and so she tested and bought 10 of them to see how real they would look compared to their picture.

Bjork Ostrom: And it didn’t, not at all,

Kate Ahl: Really not at all. She’s like, if you look at the way this ruffles a dress in real life, can’t do this unless it has structure. And she interviewed all these fashion designers, and I wanted to say this earlier, so I’m glad it came in here. The user base is more frustrated than the marketer base. I mean, go onto Reddit, and people are enraged by Pinterest right now in this whole AI movement because they love it so dearly. And I think what Pinterest, their whole thing in 2026 is going to have to make that base happy in order for this to work for any of us as marketers, because if the base doesn’t like what they’re seeing, they’re not going to continue to use it, which means they’re not going to click on ads. And so that is where I think we’re at with Pinterest is they have to make the base happy again and make them want to use the platform. It’s like the sentiment of them is who took away this one beautiful platform that’s left that I love, and now it looks just like everywhere else. And I think they’re really lamenting that

Bjork Ostrom: You would hear people talk about this idea that Pinterest was a social platform you could go to where it wasn’t overrun with your uncle’s political comment and then your other aunt’s response to him, and it wasn’t as rage inducing or anxiety producing as some of these other platforms because of the way the algorithms work on those platforms. Whereas Pinterest, it’s like you go and you find recipe content and you’re searching for a crockpot recipe or world,

Kate Ahl: It was your world, remodel

Bjork Ostrom: Your world, you got to do thing, and now you have this AI content that’s starting to come into your world and it doesn’t feel helpful in the same way, this erosion of trust and then that’s a liability for this platform. But I think the thing that I keep coming back to is if that’s the way people feel, then they’ll eventually stop using the platform. If they stop using the platform, then Pinterest declines as a company. And so they need to figure out how do you push back against this world of AI content creation? But I don’t know how you do that. I think that’s the hard piece in the next year, two, three years. I think the pace at which a company like Pinterest can have a toggle off AI button is going to be slower than the pace that people can create content that is indistinguishable from other content. And do you have any thoughts on that?

Kate Ahl: Yeah, I mean, one as my hope is it would happen quicker, sooner rather than later. But I agree with you. It’s just this point where I don’t know how you do that. I don’t know how as a big company you put into the algorithm that such and such can’t be there. I mean, I’ve heard stories over the years about even Google saying we’ve put something into the algorithm and it actually backfired or it didn’t work the way it was supposed to. And I imagine the same is there with Pinterest as well. So my hope is somehow they can be creative enough to figure that out. And I would imagine as a leader, you’re having to push forward because a publicly traded company, you’re having to be accountable to your revenue growth, you’re getting your ads, that’s where it’s at. But if you have a user base that’s so frustrated that they won’t click, what do you got? Or use the platform or use the platform. So I agree with you, I really think 26 and 27 are going to be huge defining years, I think for a lot of platforms. But I think especially for Pinterest, where do you land and do you want to be the platform of positivity to what you said where you’re not having to have social conversations as well as being a platform that’s useful and helpful

If you’re not those things and that’s what you set out to be. I don’t know.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I feel like the initial thought that I have, and maybe this already exists within Pinterest, is the toggle off button. Hey, don’t include AI content. Okay, that’s great, but what happens when it becomes so good that there isn’t the data marketers ruin everything? They’ll figure out a way around it. It almost feels like the solution, if the answer is human forward content, human generated content, if that’s what people actually want, then it feels like the answer is that you need to have not something that excludes certain type of content, but only shows certain types of content

Kate Ahl: And

Bjork Ostrom: An opt-in process to say, Hey, I only want to see content by verified creators. I don’t know what that verification process looks like, but I know with certain platforms, if you’re running ads, you have to

Kate Ahl: Scan

Bjork Ostrom: Your license to show. And I wonder if there’s an opportunity for platforms like Pinterest to have a toggle that is human only content meaning or verified content. Maybe it’s creators who pay a nominal fee to be verified or go through a process, an ID verification process. Obviously there’s loopholes and ways around that as well, but it almost feels like that’s what you have to do because I would say it would be different if the experience was like, Hey, it’s AI generated content, and it’s like it’s a bummer for me as somebody who owns a content business, but actually everybody loves it and they think it’s funny and it’s engaging and it’s actually really helpful, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the sentiment. It seems like people don’t like it generally. And if that’s true, that’s a liability for a platform like Pinterest. And so what’s their response to it? And it feels like the response has to be that there’s a way that either filter it out, which I don’t believe it would be possible. So then it’s like how do you go opt-in only? But I don’t know to what degree you could do that at scale. I think that’s the hard part, I

Kate Ahl: Think. Okay, I have two thoughts about this. One. I think the whole of the internet is going to start to trend towards that as well. We started to hear conversations about foreign based accounts in our social medias and how that impacts and all those kinds of things. But then I attended Affiliate Summit West last weekend and it was new to me. I’d never been there. It was like my world was opened up. And what I found fascinating is I was watching these players do Facebook accounts and they had Facebook ad accounts, and there were specific tools where you could whitelist your Facebook ad account and you could run all these affiliates and you can do all these things. And I’m over here going, there are so many gates for Pinterest ads. There’s no way you could even whitelist a Pinterest ad account. It doesn’t exist, right?

And so you have these two markets for their monetization platform, one that is wide open to everybody, and then one that is so clamped down. And then you have the organic markets that are completely different. Whereas Pinterest, I think the problem is that the loophole is in their organic distribution, whereas if they kind of went to a model they have with their ads where it is heavily gate keeped and curated, I mean they just let through that. You could talk about GLP ones, whereas on Facebook, it’s like everybody’s talking about that. And so I guess I would say they need to temper it a little bit in the organic and say, here’s the gates that we have. And I agree with you. I think that would be a super smart move to do a verified account, which they have started before, then pulled back and then started again, and then pulled back. I just don’t understand why they don’t do a verified creator account.

Bjork Ostrom: And I suppose anytime you introduce friction, there’s the potential or the probability that there’s less content that’s published. But all that to say, I think it’ll be interesting to see how it unfolds. But the thing that I’m most curious about in any situation like this is what’s the opportunity? And I think things will always shift, things will always change. And how we can approach it is like, this stinks. I’m grumpy about it. Or okay, light on your feet. Let’s look at what’s happening and say what’s the opportunity where is there even something as specific as, let’s say it gets really easy to create food images and then to scrape a site and duplicate that. And essentially we’ve had this happen with Pitch of Yum, have a site that essentially is all the recipes, slightly iterated all the images, slightly iterated, pump those onto Pinterest, get traffic and monetize with some weird third party ad company that will approve your

Kate Ahl: Anybody.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Kate Ahl: A dog.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Okay, so that’s happening, but what can we do that differentiates ourselves from that? Because if somebody’s able to make money from that and it’s really easy, then 9 million other people are going to eventually figure that out and it’s going to be diluted and it’s not going to be valuable. People aren’t going to see it as valuable. And so you need to differentiate yourself.

A super concrete example is like, okay, how do you create short form video that is very personal and doesn’t feel like highly produced? It’s not going to trigger the, is this AI video? I don’t know the exact formula to do that, but there definitely is a way to differentiate yourself in a way that people can very quickly say like, oh, I trust this. And I think as trust is being diluted on certain platforms with certain types of content, the opportunity is finding, okay, how do you see that not as, oh, shoot, the way that I was creating content previously. Now a lot of other people are doing that and people don’t trust it. But instead to say, okay, if that’s true, how do I do this in a different way where people are able to see it and like, oh, I actually trust you more because of that.

Kate Ahl: Yes. Do you

Bjork Ostrom: Have thoughts on what that looks like within the contest?

Kate Ahl: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Of Pinterest,

Kate Ahl: And this is the first time I’ve had this thought, so I really love that you’re bringing this up. I actually think for years we’ve said faces are not something good on Pinterest. I think we go back

Bjork Ostrom: To faces. Yeah, that’s the immediate that I had.

Kate Ahl: Yeah, exactly. It would be like Lindsay standing in front of her salmon bowl or whatever it is actually a still image and her and Pinch of Yum branding somewhere on the image. That was

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing I thought was the branding.

Kate Ahl: Totally. Yeah, the branding. I would do those two things right away. I have said, well, maybe you could put human created or not AI to be a distinguisher, but then AI can copy that too as well. Right now the barrier is I click on an image, I go to a website, I don’t know if it’s real.

So I think it’s helping people bridge that gap before they have to click. And I think your face is number one, what you can do right away and show the realness of it. The same with having ingredients on the counter, kind of like PI mean we’re going back to 2016, it’s kind of like Pinterest 2016 where it’s a little bit more raw, a little bit less polished, a little bit less of this perfect photo because then people know, oh yeah, my kitchen looks like that. AI is not going to make a kitchen look like that.

So yeah, I do think it is being light, it’s pivoting, and that’s where we’re at right now as a company to take all the data that we have and go, okay, 2025 was a weird year, but if we look at the cues of where Pinterest is at, what are the things that will help people be creative in 2026? And we’ve never before come out with statements to say, this is simple pin guidelines. But that’s kind of where we’re going is like this is your guidelines in 2026 to navigate this landscape on Pinterest in a way that feels productive for your business, leaves you creative and not overwhelmed with, do I do five or 10 pins a day? We’re beyond that question. We don’t even have to ask that anymore. So it’s things like this, how do you show up with your face? How do you do things like we did in 2016? I think those are really creative questions to ask.

Bjork Ostrom: And I see that even with the creators that are experiencing the most growth on social, this is completely anecdotal, but I think what I’m seeing, it’s people who are setting a camera up in their kitchen and pressing record, and not that they’re not doing any editing, but it’s them in their kitchen hanging out, making a recipe, and maybe you get to know the characters in their world, like their family or their dog or whatever it might be. And that I think the hard piece with it is that’s a little bit of a slower build. And I haven’t said this before, but I think there’s something here. I think it’s harder to build a brand than it is to build traffic,

But it’s more stable to build a brand than it is to build traffic. And I think that there was a version of content creation where you could do things to build traffic, and that was like SEO best practices and the Pinterest formula, how often you’re posting what it looks like. All of those things are still helpful and still important. But I think the thing that will work better moving forward is still thinking strategically about these platforms, but thinking about them not in the context of building traffic, but how do they help me build a brand which the downflow impact of that can be traffic. It can also be product sales, it can be book sales, it can be substack subscriptions, but moving away from this idea of just traffic, and I think the brand piece is around logo, is around personality when you’re creating content online. Anything you’d add to that.

Kate Ahl: Yeah, I like that. And I think that’s exactly where we’re going because was we could pull the lever of traffic so easily, but now it’s who we remember. I go to Lindsay’s blog to make the chocolate chip cookies and I’ve shared it with everybody like my chocolate chip cookie, and now I’m threaded in with what she creates. And then there’s other bakers that I’ve established this with. So it’s like thinking of it as Pinterest is your doorway to build the branding and you’re doing that at the same time. Because there’s people that we have found on Pinterest over the years, and I’ve even heard my real life friends say, oh, I found this on Pinterest and now I follow this woman and I’m on Instagram with her. Now I’m all in.

And I think it is harder to build a brand because there’s that dance of how much do we share, how much do we not share? And the great thing about those who have been in the industry for a long time is they have done that so they can weather these storms a little bit easier because they build the brand. But even the challenge for new people that are entering into it, it’s like think brand first and think of connection too, because people are craving connection. They’re not just one and done all the time, but they’re looking for trusted resources, especially in this whole idea of trust recession and where it’s at. How can I trust you to make great recipes? And I know the people that I trust to go, I will go to your website and whatever you put on it, I know it’s going to be good. So I agree with you, and it was way easier to build for traffic than it is for brand sometimes.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think the advantage with building for a brand is it’s more stable. Yes, it’s transferable. It’s not like a hack that you’ve figured out in order to get a bunch of traffic via some platform. It’s like there’s more to it than that. And

Kate Ahl: Can I interject this? I don’t foresee a time, I could be totally wrong, where people are having a conversation and their trusted brand is an AI resource. I could see them saying, I use an AI tool, but I don’t see them saying a fake AI website that they’re revisiting over and over again because they’ve proven themselves to create great recipes. I just don’t see that happening

Bjork Ostrom: For sure. And probably I would imagine what happens is you’ll go to AI for certain things. It will be your trusted resource for a category of things, but you’ll also probably go to humans for certain things. I was just having this conversation with Lindsay and we were talking about the idea of a chat interface as a therapist and starting to hear more chatter of people in our world who are like, chatt PT told me this thing and now I feel better. It’s like, oh wow, that’s crazy. I think that will happen more and more, and I do think that people will go to it more and more as a resource, but I don’t think that it completely replaces humans. But I do think it’s a legitimate replacement in some areas and will become more and more of that over time. I think the question is in what categories will it completely engulf that? Will we ever go to a website again to figure out how long to boil an egg? Probably not. It’ll probably be an AI overview. It’ll probably be chat GPT. We’re not going to go to the person who ranked well for how long to boil a hard boil boiling

That search term is done, done for them, that’s dead. So I think it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out as all of these chat interfaces get better and better. And I do think the video and image, human-based video and images are the one differentiator that will continue to be novel. I don’t know, for three, four or five years. Hopefully that’s our focus as we think about content moving forward paired with sending people to a website. And eventually I think product makes sense there as well if you haven’t.

Kate Ahl: Well, I think too, people are going to crave in-person connection.

So I was talking with somebody about if you have the ability to gather people together, whether that is in a community online, we just started using school and I had a Facebook group community ages ago and I kind of pulled back on it. It was like nobody really wants that. But now I pulled it in like, we want to have better discussion around these topics. And so I think in person, I’m seeing a lot of people go to events there as well. And this is on the topic, but it got my wheels turning and I just can’t stop thinking about it. But it was this short podcast series. It’s like eight episodes called The Last Invention About AI and about it blew my mind.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you remember who produced it or

Kate Ahl: Andy Mills.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Kate Ahl: He was the one who helped start the Daily at New York Times. And so him and someone else goes on this journey of the start of AI in the fifties until now. And it’s a very interesting conversation and it’s gotten me thinking like, okay, who is of the leadership at Pinterest, what is their thoughts on ai? Are they the accelerationist? Are they the doomers? Are they the scouts? Who are they? And I think that in any platform, whether it’s Google or Meta, determines what happens for the user base because they have determined this is the direction we’re going with AI and this is how our user base has to adjust. How that does in the market for them, how that adjusts with their stock. That probably was too soon to tell, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. We could go another hour.

Kate Ahl: I know. We good.

Bjork Ostrom: But the good thing is you have a podcast where you talk about this stuff. Is that something continually publishing to, how can people subscribe to that? You have a newsletter as well that you send out, so maybe talk about that a little bit and then if people want to work with you to take the burden of the decision making with Pinterest off of their shoulders. You can maybe talk about Simple Pin as well.

Kate Ahl: Yeah, I still have the podcast. It’s year 10, which is crazy. You understand when you, I’ve been doing it for a long time. We’re taking a little bit of a different take where we’re doing a lot of more long form interviews about people in their business, some Pinterest adjacent, and then I’m doing that twice a month and the other two times a month I’m doing kind of like my take called Kate’s take, which is like five minutes, but kind of what I’m processing through, what I’m thinking about, how I’m thinking about Pinterest strategy in 2026. So Simple Pin podcast, you can find that there. And then yeah, at Simple Pin Media we will meet with you and figure out how can we work with you, whether that’s ads, images, one-time cleanup, whatever it is. We’re seeing a lot of people really interested in one-time cleanups.

They can see that their Pinterest account is kind of a disaster, not keyworded. So they’ll hire us for that and then they’ll do strategy on their own. But lots of really authentic conversations with people about where they are at in their business, how they want to use it, and also us really trying to lean more into e-commerce as well, what that looks like and how we can support people in those areas to diversify their income. A big conversation right now too, to just how many levers can we pull that are maybe not ads revenue dominant,

Bjork Ostrom: But

Kate Ahl: We can have other ones flowing into our business.

Bjork Ostrom: Some of the areas I’m most interested in is food brands like CPG brands, not even necessarily creating one on our own, but aligning with other folks who have created a CPG brand who know that world well. And so

Kate Ahl: Have you ever thought of going to Expo West or Expo East?

Bjork Ostrom: People mentioned it and actually just recently I was talking to somebody and they’re like, you really need to go sometime even just to hang out and kind of float around and get an idea for it so we can add it to the list. Would you go? Do you go,

Kate Ahl: I haven’t gone, but it’s one of the ones I really wanted to go. This is my year two attend conferences. We set aside a budget for it and we said it’s all about just exploration, getting in the room with people, because I realized that that’s also another way to combat ai, right? AI can’t be in the room with you and they can’t have these conversations in the hallway. So actually affiliate Summit West, I thought would have more e-commerce. It just blew my mind how many We walked around, it’s like a thousand people. You have influencers, you have tools and programs, and it was like, these are the people who sell to the world. These are the tools, these are the ways in which I just never seen it. So it kind of, yeah, I walked

Bjork Ostrom: Away. I went once like 10 years ago.

Kate Ahl: Was it big then? How many people did

Bjork Ostrom: It have? I don’t remember. But it’s interesting, anytime you get into a different corner of the internet

Kate Ahl: That

Bjork Ostrom: You’re not used to where it’s still internet people, but it’s like how they talk, how they think,

Kate Ahl: How they make money,

Bjork Ostrom: What the strategies are, how they make money is all very different. And even that is super helpful to widen your perspective.

Kate Ahl: Yep. And it definitely did for me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Great. We’ll have to have you on again soon, Kate, as always, such a joy to talk to you and it’s super helpful for us. So thanks for coming on.

Kate Ahl: Thank you.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please make sure to share it with your community or leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another episode. Bjork is interviewing Tanya Harris from the Food Blog, my Forking Life, all about audience building through authenticity. It’s going to be a really great episode and we’ll look forward to seeing you back here next week to give it a listen. In the meantime, take care of yourself, be kind to your neighbors and make it a great week.