Pinterest (Pinterest (PINS)) is having a good day. The company reported first-quarter results that beat expectations, and investors are rewarding it with a double-digit pop in premarket trading. The stock was up nearly 17% to $24.37 Tuesday morning.

The numbers tell a pretty clear story: revenue hit $1.01 billion, well above the $966.25 million analysts were looking for. Adjusted earnings came in at 27 cents per share, also ahead of the 23-cent consensus. Revenue grew 18% from a year ago, and the company's global monthly active users climbed 11% to 631 million.

That user growth is broad-based. In the U.S. and Canada, Pinterest added 4% more users to reach 106 million. Europe grew 7% to 159 million, and the Rest of World region jumped 15% to 367 million. Average revenue per user globally was $1.61, while in the U.S. and Canada it was $7.12. The revenue gains were led by retail, with financial services and other emerging categories also chipping in.

But the real story here might be what Pinterest is doing with artificial intelligence. The company has been investing heavily in AI, and it's starting to show results.

The big advancement is something called PinRec, a generative retrieval system that's trained on user activity and Pinterest's Taste Graph. It uses a single model to deliver personalized results across all surfaces. Since its launch in 2025 and expansion in the first quarter, PinRec has improved search fulfillment by about 180 basis points. That's a fancy way of saying people are finding what they're looking for more often. And it's also reduced advertiser cost per acquisition and cost per click by roughly the same amount. That's good for advertisers, which should be good for Pinterest's business over time.

Search is a big deal for Pinterest. Over 72% of impressions now come from search surfaces. The company also expanded its search ranking models by increasing user context windows by 30 times, now using up to 16,000 user actions over two years. That update improved search fulfillment by about 70 basis points and increased saves by roughly 390 basis points. Saves are a key engagement metric, so that's a meaningful jump.

Pinterest is also making life easier for advertisers. It introduced A/B testing tools in the first quarter, and early results are promising. Take Mejuri, a jewelry brand. Using Pinterest's Performance+ campaigns, Mejuri saw a 46% increase in return on ad spend and a 62% increase in conversions. That's the kind of result that gets advertisers to open their wallets.

The company is also strengthening its measurement capabilities by integrating with advertisers' first-party systems. That allows optimization based on metrics like lifetime value and profit per order, rather than just clicks or impressions. Early testing showed a 15% to 20% improvement in lifetime value ROAS. Pinterest plans to expand integrations with third-party measurement partners as well.

Total ad impressions increased 24% in the quarter, though ad pricing declined 5% year-over-year. That's a trade-off Pinterest seems willing to make as it focuses on volume and performance.

Looking ahead, Pinterest expects second-quarter revenue between $1.13 billion and $1.15 billion, above the $1.11 billion consensus. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $256 million to $276 million. For the full year, the company expects the adjusted EBITDA margin to remain around 29%, which includes the impact of the TVScientific integration and continued investment in AI infrastructure.

So Pinterest is growing users, improving its ad platform with AI, and giving guidance that beats expectations. That's a recipe for a stock pop. Whether it can sustain the momentum will depend on how well it continues to execute, but for now, investors are feeling pretty good about the pinboard.