The Rich Pins Validator: Turning Them On, and Fixing Them When They Break

Rich Pins are one of the few genuinely free wins on Pinterest: they pull information straight from your web page onto every pin that links to it, automatically, forever. Your title, your description, and for shops the current price and availability — kept in sync without you touching a thing.

The reason they’re worth caring about is subtle. A pin with rich metadata looks more substantial and more trustworthy in the feed, and because the information comes from your page rather than whatever someone typed when they saved it, it stays accurate even on pins you didn’t create. Set it up once and every future pin of your content inherits it.

What Rich Pins actually read

This is the bit that demystifies the whole feature: Rich Pins invent nothing. They read metadata that already exists on your page — the same tags that produce the preview card when someone shares a link on any other platform.

So “enabling Rich Pins” is mostly a matter of making sure that metadata is present and correct, then telling Pinterest to go and look. If you run a reasonably modern website or an SEO plugin, most of these tags are probably already there and you’re closer to done than you think.

For shops there’s an extra layer: product markup carrying price, currency and availability. That’s what produces the price on a product pin, and it’s also what keeps it correct when you run a sale — which is a real advantage over hard-coding a price into a pin description that will be wrong next month.

The types, and which one you get

You don’t choose a Rich Pin type — Pinterest works it out from the markup on your page, which is why the answer to “how do I get product pins?” is always “add product markup”, never “find the setting”.

• Article pins pull a headline, description and author, and suit blogs, guides and recipes.
• Product pins pull price, currency and availability, and are what shops want.
• Recipe pins pull ingredients, cook time and servings where the right markup exists.

A page with product markup becomes a product pin; a page with article markup becomes an article pin. If you’re getting the wrong type, the markup on the page is the thing to change — and if you’re getting no type at all, you’re usually missing the basic tags entirely rather than the fancy ones.

Before you validate: claim the site

Rich Pins do not work on an unclaimed website. If you skip that step, you can have perfect metadata and the validator will still refuse you, and the error won’t obviously say why. So if you haven’t already, go and claim your website first — it takes five minutes and it’s the single most common reason this process fails.

Running the validator

The validator is a simple form: you paste in one URL from your site, it fetches the page, reads the metadata, and tells you what it found or what’s missing. Approve it and the setting applies across your whole domain — you validate once, not per page.

Choose the URL carefully. Use a real content page — an actual article or product — rather than your homepage, because homepages often have thinner or more generic metadata and can produce a confusing result that doesn’t reflect the pages you actually care about.

The four errors, and what they really mean

Missing a required tag

The validator will name the tag it couldn’t find. Usually a theme is stripping it, or an SEO plugin is configured to leave it out, or two plugins are fighting and one is winning. View the page source and search for the tag: if it genuinely isn’t there, the fix is in your theme or plugin settings, not in Pinterest.

Blocked from crawling

Pinterest has to fetch the page to read it. If your robots file blocks it, or a security plugin or firewall treats the request as suspicious, it never gets there. This one is easy to misdiagnose because the page loads perfectly for you in a browser — the block is specific to automated fetches, so you have to check the crawl rules rather than trusting your own eyes.

Invalid markup

The tags exist but are malformed — a plugin wrote something the parser can’t read, or two plugins have each added their own version and the result is contradictory. Duplicate metadata is a surprisingly common cause, and the fix is usually turning the feature off in one of the two plugins rather than adding anything new.

Site not claimed

Exactly what it says, and covered above. Claim first, then validate.

How to check it’s actually working

Don’t rely on the validator’s success message alone. Go and look at a real pin of your content in the app and confirm the title and description are being pulled through, and that they match your page rather than whatever was typed when the pin was created.

A useful side effect: once Rich Pins are live, your page title becomes the pin title on anything anyone saves from your site. That makes your on-page titles do double duty, and it’s a good reason to write them for humans scrolling a feed rather than purely for search engines. There’s more on that in pin titles that rank.

Rich Pins are not a ranking boost

Worth setting expectations honestly, because Rich Pins get credited with more than they deliver. They do not directly push your pins up the results. What they do is make your pins look more complete and more credible in a crowded feed, which tends to earn more clicks and saves — and those signals are what actually move distribution.

So the benefit is real but indirect, and it arrives gradually rather than as a step change. Anyone promising that switching on Rich Pins will transform your reach overnight is overselling it. Turn them on because they are free, permanent and make every future pin of your content better, not because you expect a spike next week.

Where this sits in the stack

Rich Pins are the second of four tracking layers. Claim the site, enable Rich Pins, install the tag, then tag your links. Rich Pins are the one that makes your content look right; the tag is the one that tells you whether any of it worked. They solve different problems and you want both.

Worth a twice-yearly check alongside your claim, since both break for the same reasons and neither will email you about it. Five minutes, twice a year, to protect something running silently on every pin of your content is a trade I’ll take every time.

And once the plumbing is right, the interesting question becomes which of your pages are worth pinning in the first place — which topics genuinely pull demand rather than just looking good in a feed. That’s the part PinPinterest is built for.

Next: claim your website if that’s still outstanding, then install the tag — or read the whole stack in order.