Summary
Auto Draft is the WordPress post status assigned to a newly created post that has been opened in the editor but never saved. WordPress creates it so uploads, autosaves and revisions have a post ID to attach to. It is invisible to visitors and search engines, and the platform removes auto-drafts older than seven days on its own.
Nitin Batra is a Google certified digital marketing professional who manages WordPress publishing workflows, technical SEO audits and analytics implementations for client websites.
Last updated: August 16, 2026
Auto Draft is the default WordPress post status given to a brand new post that has been opened in the editor but never saved, and WordPress automatically deletes these empty records after seven days.
- A user property
- A dimension
- A metric
- An event parameter
The correct answer is: A metric
Key Takeaways
- – Auto Draft is the WordPress status applied to a newly created post that has never been saved by the author.
- – WordPress creates the record immediately so autosave, revisions and uploaded media have a valid post ID to attach to.
- – An auto-draft is not public, is not indexed and does not appear in normal post listings, because it holds no saved content.
- – WordPress deletes auto-drafts older than seven days automatically, so manually clearing them is rarely needed unless the cron job is disabled.
Why does WordPress create an Auto Draft before I have typed anything?
The editor needs a post ID before it can save anything. Images, revisions, autosaves and block metadata all attach to that ID. So WordPress inserts an empty row with the auto-draft status the second the editor loads, and only converts it to a normal draft once you save.
Can an Auto Draft post be indexed by Google?
No. Auto-draft posts are not published, return a 404 or a redirect to the login screen for visitors, and are excluded from sitemaps by every major SEO plugin. If a URL like /?p=95394 appears in a crawl report, it is usually because an internal link or a plugin exported the ID, not because the post is live.
What is the difference between Auto Draft, Draft and Pending Review?
Auto Draft means the post was created but never saved. Draft means an author has saved content that is not published. Pending Review means a contributor has submitted a saved draft for an editor to approve. Only Draft and Pending Review show up normally in the Posts screen.
Should I delete Auto Draft rows from the database manually?
Usually not. WordPress runs a daily scheduled task that removes auto-drafts older than seven days. If WP-Cron is disabled on your host or you use a server cron incorrectly, these rows can pile up, and a database cleanup plugin or a simple SQL delete on posts with post_status = ‘auto-draft’ will clear them safely.