Pinterest® Research · Pinfluence Discover
Does Your Pinterest® Pin Format Affect Search Ranking?
By Pinfluencing.com · Last updated
Idea pins punch above their weight. Video ranks worst. Static is the safe default.
We looked at where every kind of Pinterest® pin lands in search: standard image pins, video pins, and Idea pins. Format does line up with ranking, but the winner depends on how many followers you have.
Idea pins take a bigger share of top results than their numbers suggest, and video sits at the bottom in every niche. For accounts with few followers, Idea pins rank best. For large accounts, plain image pins pull ahead.
Posting video pins that go nowhere?
You are not imagining it: video was the hardest format to rank in Pinterest search, especially recycled reels. Before you film another one, search your niche and see which pins and formats actually fill the top results. Free to start, no credit card.
See What Wins in Your NicheKey findings
- Idea pins over-perform. They are about 31% of all search results but take roughly 34% of the top-10 slots, and they post the best average position of any format (about 49.9, against 51.3 for static image pins). At the very top of search they show up more often than their numbers would predict.
- Video ranks worst, and Instagram is a big part of why. Video pins average around position 55 and reach the top 10 least often (about 7.6%). But three in five linked video pins point at Instagram, and those rank far worse (around position 57) than video that links elsewhere or stays on Pinterest (around 51). Video that is not an Instagram repost still trails static, but only modestly. (This is about search ranking, not reach: Pinterest surfaces video heavily in the home feed, which we do not measure here.)
- Static image pins are the dependable default. They are two-thirds of all results and hold about 64% of top-10 slots by sheer volume, sitting in the middle on average position. Nothing about a plain image pin holds you back.
- The Idea-pin edge is a small-account effect. For accounts with under 10,000 followers, Idea pins rank best. For accounts over 10,000, the order flips and static image pins pull ahead, with Idea pins falling to second.
- Idea pins rarely link off Pinterest. Only about 1 in 5 Idea pins carries an outbound link, against roughly 4 in 10 static pins, by their keep-people-on-Pinterest design. So the format you pick also shapes whether you can send traffic to your own site.
- Format works at the door, not at the table. Format (and the follower flip above) shifts your odds of getting into the top of search; once a pin makes the top 10 or top 25, all three formats sit in the same spots. And the whole spread from best to worst format is about five positions, smaller than the roughly eleven-position gap keyword placement tracked in our keyword placement study.
What this means for you
If you have a smaller following, Idea pins are worth leaning into. They rank best for accounts under 10,000 followers and give newer creators a genuine discovery edge, most likely because Pinterest uses them to surface new voices.
If you run a large account, plain image pins are your workhorse. Once you are over 10,000 followers, static pins rank best for you, and Idea pins slip to second. Keep posting them, but do not expect the format itself to carry you.
Be cautious about treating video as a search play, and especially about recycling Instagram reels. Video ranked last in every niche and follower group, but much of that gap comes from reposted Instagram content: video pins linking to Instagram sat around position 57, while video without an Instagram link sat around 51. If you post video, make it for Pinterest, with a title and description that name what people search for, rather than dropping in a reel with an Instagram link.
And remember what the format does not decide. In our data, the words in your title and description tracked a far bigger ranking gap than the container they sit in, which we measured directly in where to put your keyword on Pinterest. A well-chosen keyword on a plain image pin tends to beat a vague Idea pin.
How the three formats rank
We sorted every result into one of three formats (a standard image pin, a video pin, or an Idea pin) and looked at where each tends to land. (Remember, a lower position is better.)
| Format | Share of results | Avg. position | Reached top 10 | Reached top 25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Idea pin | 31.0% | 49.9 | 11.2% | 27.1% |
| Static image | 66.9% | 51.3 | 9.6% | 24.4% |
| Video | 2.1% | 55.0 | 7.6% | 20.8% |
The order is clear: Idea pins first, static in the middle, video last. Idea pins reach the top 10 most often and video least, and the gap from best to worst is about five positions.
Video’s showing here is striking given how small it is. At only about 2% of results, it is a sliver of Pinterest search, and the pins that do appear rank near the back. Whatever video is doing well on Pinterest, it is not climbing the search results.
Does this hold across follower sizes?
Mostly, with one important flip. We compared accounts of similar follower size so a large account’s natural ranking advantage could not do the work, and video stayed last everywhere. But the top of the order changes with account size.
| Account size | Idea pin | Static image | Video |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1,000 followers | 47.7 | 48.8 | 53.8 |
| 1,000 to 10,000 | 47.7 | 48.6 | 53.4 |
| Over 10,000 | 47.9 | 46.7 | 51.3 |
For accounts under 10,000 followers, Idea pins rank best, a little ahead of static and well ahead of video. This is the discovery edge that helps smaller creators: the format Pinterest uses to spotlight new content works in their favor.
For accounts over 10,000 followers, the order flips. Static image pins move into first, and Idea pins settle for second. Larger accounts already rank well with plain pins, so the Idea-pin boost matters less to them.
Video does not benefit from size. Even for large accounts it stays last (around position 51, against 47 for static). The format’s ranking disadvantage is not something a bigger following fixes.
Torn between Idea pins and image pins?
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Show Me the Top PinsIdea pins over-perform at the very top
One more angle makes the Idea-pin story concrete. If we look only at the top of search, Idea pins appear more often than their overall share, and video less.
| Format | Share of top 10 | Avg. spot in top 10 | Share of top 25 | Avg. spot in top 25 | All results |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Static image | 63.9% | 5.5 | 64.9% | 13.1 | 66.9% |
| Idea pin | 34.5% | 5.5 | 33.4% | 12.8 | 31.0% |
| Video | 1.6% | 5.7 | 1.7% | 13.5 | 2.1% |
Idea pins climb from about 31% of all results to about 34% of the top 10, while video slips from 2.1% to 1.6%. So Idea pins are not just ranking better on average, they are concentrating toward the very top. Once a pin makes a window, though, format stops mattering: the average spot inside the top 10 is essentially identical for all three formats (about 5.5), and the top 25 tells the same story. Format tracks whether you get in, not where you sit once you are in.
Static pins still own roughly two-thirds of the top 10 by volume, though. So ‘Idea pins rank better on average’ does not mean they fill the page. Most of what you see at the top of Pinterest search is still a plain image pin, simply because there are so many of them.
How format plays out by niche
The pattern is remarkably steady across topics, with a couple of exceptions worth knowing.
| Niche | Idea pin | Static image | Video |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home decor | 48.1 | 50.8 | 54.6 |
| Women’s fashion | 49.5 | 51.0 | 55.8 |
| DIY and crafts | 48.9 | 50.5 | 54.3 |
| Event planning | 48.8 | 50.8 | 55.5 |
| Beauty | 50.7 | 52.2 | 57.2 |
| Food and drink | 50.0 | 50.5 | 56.0 |
| Art | 50.9 | 52.6 | 57.3 |
| Entertainment | 53.0 | 53.0 | 53.5 |
Video ranks worst in every niche, often by four to six positions. If there is one takeaway to carry everywhere, it is that video is a hard sell for search ranking regardless of what you post about.
Idea pins beat static in most niches, with the clearest edge in home decor, DIY, event planning, and women’s fashion. The exceptions are food and drink, where the two are about even, and entertainment, where all three formats rank about the same. So the Idea-pin advantage is real but topic-dependent.
Is video’s problem really Instagram?
Partly, yes. A fair question is whether video ranks poorly because so much of it is recycled from other platforms, so we split video pins by where they link.
| Video pins that… | Appearances | Avg. position | Reached top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Link to Instagram | 879K | 56.8 | 6.3% |
| Link somewhere else | 599K | 51.7 | 10.1% |
| Have no link | 739K | 50.4 | 10.7% |
Three in five linked video pins point at Instagram, and they are the ones dragging the average down. Take the Instagram-linked pins out and video sits around position 51 with a 10.4% top-10 rate, still behind comparable image pins (48.6 and 11.5%), but a modest gap rather than a chasm. So the honest read is: reposted Instagram video ranks badly, while video made for Pinterest is only a little behind static. This also matches what we found in our study of where pins link, where Instagram was the weakest major destination for every format.
How we did this
This study uses the Pinfluencing.com research index, which organizes public information from Pinterest® search results.
These cuts run over the full index, about 128 million pin appearances drawn from roughly 1.3 million searches across 56 million unique pins, indexed through early July 2026. Each row records where a pin ranked for a given search, where 1 is the top.
- Format is known for every pin. Unlike text fields, a pin’s format (image, video, or Idea pin) is captured at the search stage, so these cuts run over all 128 million results. The follower-size comparison uses only pins with a real follower count.
- The three formats are a clean split. A pin is an Idea pin if it is flagged as one, otherwise a video if flagged as video, otherwise a standard image pin. Idea and video overlap on only a handful of pins.
- Pin type partly reflects the publishing tool. Pinterest has been merging Idea pins into regular pins, converts multi-image uploads into video, and its API and most schedulers can only create standard image or video pins, while Idea-type pins come from uploads made in Pinterest itself. So the same content can land as a different type depending on how it was published, and the format flag carries some of that signal.
- Ranking is not reach. This measures where pins land in search, not how much reach or engagement they earn. Video ranking last in search does not mean video gets less reach; Pinterest surfaces video heavily in the home feed, which we do not see.
- Idea pins were mid-transition. Pinterest changed and merged the Idea-pin format repeatedly through 2024 to 2026, so this is a single snapshot of an evolving format.
- This shows a connection, not a cause, the default logged-out view, roughly the first 100 results per search, search position only. A format ranking better could reflect the format itself or the kind of creator who tends to use it.
Format was worth five positions. Keywords tracked eleven.
Whatever you post, the bigger gap in this study came from titles and descriptions that name what people actually search. Pinfluence Discover pulls those phrases for your niche from the same index behind these numbers. Free to start, no credit card.
Find Your Keywords FreeFrequently asked questions
Do Idea pins rank better on Pinterest?
On average, yes, especially for smaller accounts. Idea pins posted the best average position of the three formats and took a larger share of top-10 slots than their overall numbers. But for accounts over 10,000 followers the edge flips, and standard image pins rank best.
Do video pins rank well in Pinterest search?
Not in our data, but the miss is concentrated: three in five linked video pins point at Instagram, and those averaged around position 57, while video that links elsewhere or has no link sat around 51. This is about search ranking only; Pinterest surfaces video heavily in the home feed, which we did not measure.
What is the best pin format for Pinterest ranking?
It depends on your following. Under 10,000 followers, Idea pins ranked best. Over 10,000, standard image pins ranked best. Video ranked last for everyone. And format matters less than whether your title and description contain the words people search for.
Are static image pins still worth posting?
Yes. Standard image pins are two-thirds of all search results and hold about 64% of top-10 slots, and they rank best of all for large accounts. They are the dependable default, and a relevant keyword on a plain image pin tends to outrank most Idea pins.
Why do Idea pins rank better for small accounts?
We can only observe the pattern, not the cause, but it is consistent with Pinterest using Idea pins to surface newer creators. Under 10,000 followers, Idea pins ranked best. For large accounts, who already rank well with image pins, that boost fades and static wins.
Does pin format matter more than keywords?
No. Format moved ranking by about five positions from best to worst; in our data, a keyword in the right place tracked a far bigger gap. Pick a format that fits your account, then focus on naming what people actually search for, which we cover in our keyword placement study.
About the data and Pinfluence Discover
Every number here comes from the Pinfluencing.com research index of public Pinterest® search results, indexed through early July 2026.
Whatever format you favor, the work that moves ranking is finding the phrases people search for in your niche and writing them into your titles and descriptions. Pinfluence Discover is built for that, with a free plan that gives you keyword searches every day, no credit card needed.
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