Your Image Is Now a Keyword
September 23, 2026
Visual AI is starting to make brand assets behave like performance assets.
Welcome to this week's Takumi AI Brief.
For 25 years, search relied on one basic assumption.
The customer could describe what they wanted.
Sometimes they couldn't. They just knew it when they saw it.
That's starting to matter a lot more.
Pinterest has launched Visual Search Ads, letting brands appear based on what someone is looking at, not only what they type.
Pinterest says users now run more than 80 billion searches a month, most of them visual, more than half carrying commercial intent.
That sounds like a media update.
It isn't.
Brand meaning is becoming searchable.
01 · The Trend That Actually Matters
Think about a jacket you notice on someone.
You like it. You don't know the brand, the cut, or even the right words to describe it.
That used to be a problem for search.
Now you show AI the image. The image becomes the query.
Pinterest has been moving this direction for years, but AI makes the behaviour far more commercially useful. Someone can identify an item inside an image, find similar products, and move toward purchase without translating visual desire into a keyword first.
That closes a real gap.
For years, performance marketing was very good at capturing intent once a customer could express it.
Visual AI can capture intent before the customer knows how to put it into words at all.
02 · The Search Box Is Becoming Optional
There's been endless debate about whether ChatGPT replaces Google .
I think the more interesting question is whether the search box itself becomes less central.
When someone can show instead of describe, the interface changes.
A photograph becomes a shopping brief. A room becomes a design brief.
Pinterest's new Restyle feature goes further, letting people photograph their own space and use AI to reimagine furniture, colours and décor inside it.
The customer isn't starting with a keyword anymore.
They're starting with context.
And context is a far richer signal than a few typed words ever were.
03 ·Brand Assets Are Starting to Do Performance Work
This is where CMOs should pay attention.
For years, we built an artificial divide. Brand teams created recognition and meaning. Performance teams bought keywords and intent.
Visual AI is blurring that line fast.
A product image isn't only something designed to look good anymore. It helps a machine understand what the product is, what it resembles, what occasion it belongs to, when it should surface.
Packaging can become searchable. Product design can become a discovery signal. Distinctive visual codes can help machines recognise a brand the same way they help people recognise it.
Call this Visual Equity, the discovery value a distinctive design carries once machines can read it the way people already do. For years, brand equity and performance sat in separate budgets. Visual Equity doesn't respect that line at all.
04 · If I Were in the CMO Chair
I'd ask one uncomfortable question.
If our logo disappeared, would an AI still know the product was ours?
That sounds like a classic branding question.
Increasingly, it's a performance question too.
A Nike shoe often looks like Nike before you ever read the word Nike. The same is true of distinctive shapes, colours, packaging and product design across every strong brand.
Those assets were built to create memory.
Now they may also drive discovery.
→ Who owns visual search? Brand? Performance? Ecommerce? Search?
→ The honest answer is probably all of them
→ AI keeps exposing how many of our marketing structures were built around channels, not around how customers actually behave
Visual discovery doesn't care which team owns the asset. It simply uses the signal.
The CMO Takeaway
Pinterest 's announcement is easy to dismiss as another ad product.
The bigger implication is harder to ignore.
For years, marketers optimised words for machines and images for people.
That distinction is disappearing.
When someone can search with a photograph, packaging becomes data. Product design becomes a discovery signal. Distinctive visual assets start doing a job once reserved for keywords.
Brand and performance don't suddenly become the same thing.
But the wall between them gets harder to defend every quarter.
The next high-performing search asset may not be something your performance team writes.
It may be something your brand team designed years ago.
The next keyword may not be something you type.
It may be something you designed.
Mohit Lodha, Founder, Takumi AI