Are you publishing drafts to your live site?
I’m asking because, hugo has a flag -D, --buildDrafts
, which can be used to show drafts in your lists and as single pages, but which if left off, will serve to cause hugo to hide those. If you build using that, yes, drafts will be included.
You can also store that as true in your config file, which means hugo will always show/build drafts.