Pinterest is changing. What does that mean for creatives? Image licensed via Adobe Stock
As AI takes over from Google search, the thing that used to draw people to your creative work is disappearing fast. Here’s what’s happening, and how to respond.
At Cannes Lions 2026, Pinterest said something that should stop every creative in their tracks. Alongside a suite of shiny new AI advertising tools, the platform offered a candid description of where the whole industry is heading.
The web, it said, is moving “beyond the traditional search-and-click model toward a more conversational and generative web,” where brands now compete “not just for attention, but for recommendation, relevance and action”. That might sound like a boringly technical sentence, but buried within it is something very profound that affects every creative working today.
Because what it describes isn’t just a change in how Pinterest sells ads, but a fundamental change in how people find information and inspiration online. And if you’re a creative, the implications for whether you actually get work in future are huge.
Discovery is being dismantled
Until recently, the web gifted creatives many ways to attract clients that didn’t demand a huge marketing budget. A portfolio site that ranked in search results for “editorial illustrator” or “branding studio Bristol.” Instagram, Behance or Dribbble surfacing work to people who’d never heard of you. A piece is getting shared, and the share carries your name back to your profile. None of this required paid promotion.
Now, though, every rung of that ladder has been sawn off.
We’ve seen the decline of organic search: on Google, your freelance or studio site now sits below ads, AI Overviews and big-domain content, making it close to hopeless in promoting your craft. Meanwhile, social algorithms have decoupled reach from quality. Feeds now reward volume, trends and posting cadence rather than the best work, and throttle creators unless they either pay or perform constantly.
And now, as the final nail in the coffin, agentic AI (where AI basically acts as your personal assistant) has removed the last thing the first two still left intact: the click that carried a person to your door.
Who wins and who loses?
Nowadays, when someone types “find me an illustrator who works in cut-paper collage for a children’s book”, AI returns an answer, not a list of links to explore. It decides who gets named, and there’s no way to influence it: no ad slot to buy, no SEO lever to pull.
And how does it reach this decision? AI platforms lean on aggregate signals: who’s already cited, listed, written about, and linked to. This favours the already-famous and the big studios with a deep web footprint, leaving the vast majority of smaller independents floundering.
It’s a virtuous circle for the former, a vicious one for the latter. The visible gets recommended, and the recommendation makes them more visible. The talented new graduate with a thin online presence isn’t in AI’s field of view, so they stay invisible forever.
Pinterest’s new Ask Pinterest app captures this dynamic perfectly. It’s designed, the company says, for “more conversational, complex, multi-step decisions that don’t fit neatly into a single search”: planning a dinner party, furnishing a room over time, finding a gift that feels personal. Truly, it sounds like a great experience. But there’s a trade-off, and it’s a biggie. When answers arrive without a source, the source no longer matters.
So what should you focus on instead?
Pinterest is changing
Be a category of one
In this shiny new world of AI, you can’t optimise your way into a recommendation, the way you once keyword-optimised a website. Recommendation runs on reputation signals that a system can read: being named in other people’s work, on lists, in interviews, in the press, and in collaborations. So the answer for creatives isn’t to play the algorithms harder. It’s to become the name people and systems already trust enough to surface.
One part of that is to own your relationships. A newsletter list, for example, is a direct connection that no algorithm can intermediate away. A community of people who’ve chosen to hear from you isn’t subject to a platform’s recommendation logic. Look at how designers like Liz Mosley have built something genuinely resilient: a website, a podcast, templates, resources; an audience that actively follows her work rather than stumbling across it.
Another is to get cited and named, because getting talked about (positively, of course) is the new currency. This means leaning on the channels no algorithm can gatekeep: word of mouth, referrals, events, and real rooms. And in your work, aiming to be a category of one, with a style so specific it gets requested by name rather than retrieved by attribute. The creatives who get asked for by name are the ones that AI can neither replace nor substitute.
Lee Brown, Pinterest’s chief business officer, frames it this way: “The future of discovery won’t be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations.” He’s describing his platform’s perceived advantage. But he’s also, accidentally, describing yours.
Context is where you work. Taste is what you’ve spent years developing. And trusted recommendations? Those come from people who know you and what you make, not from a system optimising for engagement.
Uncertain future
One last thought. If the systems doing the recommending keep starving the independents who make the original work, they’ll eventually run short of anything worth recommending. AI will ultimately kill off its own supply of information and inspiration. Where that death-spiral leads us is anyone’s guess, but it’s best to be prepared all the same.
In the meantime, I’d advise you to start building those direct relationships. Make the work that can’t be AI-assembled from anything else. And above all, don’t wait for your web traffic to disappear before you start, because that could be too late.