Do Rich Pins Help You Rank on Pinterest®? We Compared 293,000 Pins

Key findings

What this means for you

If you publish recipes or products and have not validated Rich Pins, this is the clearest single lever we have measured in the food and shopping niches. It is not the only reason those pins rank higher, and we say more about that below, but the gap is large, it survives every control we have, and it comes with structured data Pinterest can match to what people search.

If you publish articles, the honest answer is that the Rich Pin block itself is worth a few positions, and only in some niches. What matters more is that the block is complete: an author and a date on the page, which Pinterest reads from your site, move an article pin 11 positions, while a bare block barely beats an ordinary link. Set it up properly or do not bother.

Two things apply to everyone. First, keep the link alive: a Rich Pin whose page returns a 404 loses 11 positions and a third of its top-10 reach, and Pinterest keeps checking. Second, whatever the pin carries, the description still does the searching; longer descriptions rank higher within every kind of Rich Pin here, and we showed in the banned words study that pasting the recipe card into the description instead of letting the Rich Pin carry it costs food pins 9 to 17 positions.

A note on how to read the numbers. ‘Ranking change’ is measured against comparable pins (same niche, same search-volume band). A positive number means those pins sit higher in search, the same way a ranking change reads in Pinfluence Discover. ‘Top-10 reach’ is how often they reach the top 10 relative to what their niche and volume mix would predict; 1.00 means no difference, higher is better.

What counts as a Rich Pin here

A Rich Pin is a pin whose linked page carries structured data Pinterest has read and attached to the pin: a recipe block (ingredients, cook time, servings, ratings), a product block (price, availability) or an article block (headline, author, date). Pinterest also stores plain page data for many ordinary links, such as the site name and canonical address, without any Rich Pin block. Those pins are our control group: they come from the same kind of real, resolvable website, they were surfaced to us the same way, and the only thing they lack is the Rich Pin data.

Pinterest’s page data is attached to about 1 in 100 of the pins in our ranking index, the ones we have seen in Pinterest’s related-ideas feeds. So this study compares the kinds of pin within that group. It is a large group, 293,169 pins and 700,016 search appearances, but it is a group Pinterest already surfaces, and the numbers should be read that way.

Rich Pins against comparable pins

Read the control row first. An ordinary website pin whose page Pinterest has resolved already ranks 17 positions above comparable pins, with 1.42 times the top-10 reach. That is the value of being a real page on a real site, surfaced in Pinterest’s own feeds, before any Rich Pin data comes into it. The question for each kind of Rich Pin is how far above that row it sits: recipes 14 positions, products 16, articles 5.

Standard pins only, with video and Idea Pins removed, give the same picture: recipes 30 higher, products 33, articles 21, control 17.

Recipes: the lift holds everywhere we look

The obvious objection is that recipe Rich Pins come from established food blogs with big audiences and old, well-saved pins. So we split recipes and the control by the follower count of the publishing account, by when the pin was created, and by how long its description is.

The recipe gap over the control is 13 positions for accounts under 1,000 followers, 11 for the middle tier and 10 for accounts over 10,000. Small accounts get the lift. The article gap is 4, 8 and 1: for big accounts, an article block adds nothing the account was not already getting.

Two things stand out. The recipe lift is there in every band, 10 to 18 positions over the control. And the description still matters: a recipe Rich Pin with a 300-character description ranks 14 positions above one with a short description, which fits our description length study. The Rich Pin carries the recipe; the description carries the search phrase.

Inside the recipe data: ratings and cook time

Fifty ratings is where the rating count starts to show: those recipes rank 15 positions above unrated ones and reach the top 10 at 2.2 times the expected rate. Fewer than ten ratings does nothing. The rating value itself is less useful than you would think: recipes rated 4.5 to 4.9 rank eight positions above recipes rated a flat 5.0, because a perfect score usually means two reviews. Recipes with no total time set rank 13 positions below those in the 21-to-45-minute band. Diet tags (vegan, gluten-free and so on) make no difference at all: zero, one or several tags land within three positions of each other.

Articles: a few positions, in some niches, if the block is complete

Article Rich Pins are what most bloggers have, and they are the kind that does the least. Averaged across every niche they sit five positions above the control. Split by niche, that average hides two different stories.

In fashion, DIY, home decor and beauty, an article block goes with 10 to 16 extra positions. In food, health, design, travel, weddings and finance it goes with none. Food is the clearest case: an article block on a food page ranks three positions below the control, while a recipe block on the same kind of page ranks eight above it. If your page is a recipe, mark it up as a recipe.

This is the practical finding for bloggers. An article block with neither an author nor a date is barely better than no block (13 positions above comparable pins, against 17 for the control). With both, 24. Pinterest reads these from the page’s own markup, so the fix is on your site, not on Pinterest: a named author and a visible publish date in the article schema.

Products: the biggest lift, on a small sample

Product Rich Pins are rare in our index (2,301 pins, 6,040 appearances) because most shopping pins on Pinterest are catalog pins, which are a different system. The ones we have rank 33 positions above comparable pins and reach the top 10 at 2.8 times the expected rate; 14% of their appearances are top-10 results. The lift is largest for small accounts (40 positions for publishers under 1,000 followers) and smallest for large ones. Etsy listings, the biggest single source, sit 22 positions above comparable pins with 2.1 times the reach. Treat the product numbers as directional: the direction is strong, the sample is not.

Dead links, paywalls and app stores

Pinterest keeps checking Rich Pin links, and it shows. A Rich Pin whose page has gone 404 ranks 11 positions below a live one and loses a third of its top-10 reach, which is the same pattern we found for broken destinations in where pins link. Paywalled articles (Pinterest reads the ‘accessible for free’ flag from the page) rank like a pin with no page data at all, on a small sample. App-store links reach the top 10 at 0.89 times the expected rate, the only kind here that does worse than the control.

The checks that keep this honest

Three more cuts, because a result this size invites the question of whether it is really about Rich Pins.

Same domain, with and without. For 167 domains that have at least 20 appearances of each kind, we compared the domain’s Rich Pins with its own plain pins. The Rich Pins ranked higher in 56% of domains, by a median of 3.5 positions. This set is mostly large sites that carry both kinds (Facebook, Flickr, Medium, Etsy, Tumblr), because recipe blogs are all recipe and have no plain pins to compare against. So the within-domain check confirms the article-sized lift, a few positions, and cannot speak to the recipe-sized one.

Language. Our index is the English-language version of Pinterest search. For pages Pinterest tags as English, the recipe lift over the control is 20 positions; for other languages it is three. The article lift is seven and three. Much of the recipe advantage is an English-page advantage in an English index, which is worth knowing if you publish in another language.

Who gets surfaced. As said above, Pinterest’s page data exists in our index only for pins we have seen in Pinterest’s related-ideas feeds. The control group was surfaced the same way, which is why it is the fair comparison. But everything in this study is a pin Pinterest already shows people; it says nothing about pins it does not.

How we did this

This study uses the Pinfluencing.com research index, which organizes public information from Pinterest® search results.

The ranking data is a sample of 23.6 million ranked pins and 61.8 million search appearances drawn from about 1.3 million searches across 25 niches, indexed through early October 2026. Rich Pin data comes from Pinterest’s own page metadata for the pin, held for 18.5 million pins in a 30% sample of our pin table; 293,169 of those pins appear in the ranking sample, across 700,016 search appearances, and every table above is built from them.

Frequently asked questions

About the data and Pinfluence Discover

Every number here comes from the Pinfluencing.com research index of public Pinterest® search results, indexed through early October 2026, joined to Pinterest’s page data for each pin.

Validating Rich Pins takes an afternoon. Knowing whether it moved anything takes a tool that shows where your pins rank. Pinfluence Discover is built for that, with a free account that includes 7 days of Pro, then keyword searches every day, no credit card needed.