Measured 18 October 2026

Gala for Pinterest

Someone opens Pinterest to plan a room, a party, a dinner — and Pinterest is already reading your website to fill in the Pin. That is not a guess; it is in Pinterest's own documentation, which says a Pin shows the title, the price and the availability it finds marked up on your page, and refers to collecting them on a daily scrape. So a Pin of your work with no price on it is not Pinterest holding something back — it is your own page not saying. Gala gives your business one page that answers in your own words, where a machine can read it.

Pinterest already reads your website

This is the part most people have backwards, and it is worth reading slowly. Pinterest publishes developer documentation that permits any reader, and we fetched it this afternoon. Three sentences from it, quoted exactly:

Rich Pins work by displaying metadata from marked-up pages on your website.

Setting up Rich Pins requires you to add rich metadata tags to the content on your site.

We support Open Graph and Schema.org formats for marking up your pages.

And for a Pin that shows a product, that documentation marks four fields Required — the type, the name, the price amount and the price currency. Availability is listed as well, with a note that discontinued items will not be part of a daily scrape.

So Pinterest is not a wall between you and a buyer. It is a reader of your own pages, and a well-behaved one: it tells you exactly which fields it wants and it will not invent them.

Which means a Pin can only ever show what you published

We took a real interior design studio — the kind of business whose project photographs get saved thousands of times — and read its own site the way Pinterest says it reads one. The studio is doing better than most: it publishes a file written for machines, and it carries 18 separate pieces of structured data describing itself.

Then we ran our own scanner at the same studio, against production, in the same minute. It read the site fine — 3 pages, a real page title, 2,314 characters of readable text — and scored it 9 of 90. The first line on its own list of what is missing and publishable was a price is on the page. Underneath it: real availability, how long things take, and what the stages are.

That is the whole argument in one measurement. The studio has done the technical half — it marks itself up, it publishes for machines. What is missing is not markup. It is the answers.

And Pinterest's vocabulary has exactly three shapes

Here is the part the studio cannot fix with a better website, and we think nobody has said it plainly. Pinterest's documentation names the Pin types, and the list is closed:

There are three types of Rich Pins: Article. Product. Recipe.

An article, a thing you sell, or something you cook. A studio is none of the three. Neither is a venue, a photographer, a florist, a decorator or anyone who quotes a job rather than listing a price. So even a studio that published its fees has nowhere in Pinterest's vocabulary to put them — and the most planned-for, highest-intent surface on the internet shows the photograph and stops.

Now the other direction, and this one is in writing

We also wanted to know what an assistant receives when it asks Pinterest about you. We did not scan Pinterest, and the reason is the finding: Pinterest tells automated readers not to, in writing, and we do what it says. Its instructions file is 1,152 lines long. It opens by telling bots how to apply for an exception, and it ends like this:

1      # Allowlist your bot: ...
999    User-agent: *
1000   Disallow: /

Everything above line 999 is an allowlist: 313 individually named readers, of which 307 may read a business profile and 6 may not. Anyone not on that list may read nothing at all. So this is not an accident or a misconfiguration — it is a deliberate, maintained, closed door, and that is Pinterest's call to make.

Then we checked which readers are named. Search engines are there. So are three assistant-facing readers. And we checked fourteen of the crawlers that the assistants your customers actually use send out, by name.

We did not try to get past it and we will not. Recording a closed door is the measurement. Picking the lock is not. Pinterest also publishes no file written for assistants: the four usual addresses each answer with about 1.3 megabytes of app shell, which is the same answer an address that cannot exist gets.

How we know the instruments were working

A tool that says a thing is absent when it could not look is worse than no tool. So four controls ran beside all of this:

• One that had to succeed. A dental practice we have measured before scanned cleanly in the same run: 15 pages read, scored 29 of 90. So the scanner was working.
• One that had to fail, differently. A hostname that cannot exist came back unreachable at status 0 — so a written refusal and a dead host are not being confused.
• One that had to find a price. We ran the same metadata reader at a small shop that sells finished goods from its own website. Its product pages carry the price amount, the price currency and a product record, all present. The reader can find a price when a price is there, which is why its absence on the studio means something.
• One on the refusal evaluator itself. An empty refusal line, which means allow everything, came back as not refused. A refusal aimed only at one named crawler came back as not refused. A refusal aimed at everyone came back as refused. So it answers in both directions and is not simply saying no.

The third control is the one that makes this a finding rather than a guess. The same reader, in the same run, found a price on one site and none on the other.

What Gala does about it

Gala is not a replacement for Pinterest and it does not want your boards. It is one page, published by us, that states the things an assistant asks for — what you do, who you do it for, what it costs or how a price is worked out, how long it takes, what you will take on, how to reach you — as text a person reads and as data a machine reads, from one source, so the two cannot disagree. You keep pinning where you pin. The work stays yours; Gala is the layer that makes it readable.

And it is the one surface in this story with no allowlist and no three shapes. Your business is not an article, a product or a recipe. It is a business, and it can be published as one.

What Gala cannot do today, stated plainly: it cannot take an order and it cannot take a payment. Nothing is for sale on this page.

Start with the number

Before anything else, find out what an assistant actually receives from you. The scan is free, it runs from outside, and it reports what it could not read as well as what it could.

Run the free scan

It takes about a minute and asks for nothing but a web address.