Modern SharePoint pages have a quiet trap built into them. Someone creates a page, makes edits, saves it, and then assumes it is live because it looks finished in the editor. It is not live until it has actually been published, and there is no obvious warning banner telling you a page is sitting in draft. If your site has pages that seem to have vanished, or content that a colleague swears they updated, checking for unpublished drafts is usually the answer.
How SharePoint tracks draft versus published
Every page in the Site Pages library is version controlled. When minor versioning is enabled on that library, which is the default for Site Pages, a draft is stored as a minor version (something like 0.1, 0.2, 0.3), and publishing the page creates a major version (1.0, 2.0, and so on). A page can have several minor versions saved without ever becoming a major, published version, which is exactly the scenario that leaves people confused about why their changes are not visible to anyone else.
Finding drafts in the Site Pages library
Go to Site Contents, open Site Pages, and check the version history on any page you suspect is unpublished. Open the page's details pane (select the page, then the i icon), and look at Version History. If the most recent version number is a minor version rather than a whole number, that page has unpublished changes sitting on top of whatever was last actually published, or has never been published at all.
For a farm wide view rather than checking pages one at a time, turning on content approval in the Site Pages library's versioning settings adds an explicit approval status column, letting you filter the whole library down to everything sitting in a pending or draft state at once.
Why this is worth checking regularly
Unpublished drafts pile up quietly on active intranets, especially when several people are trusted to edit the same pages. A short review of draft status every so often, particularly before a launch or a big internal announcement, avoids the embarrassing moment where the update everyone thought went out was actually still sitting in someone's unsaved draft.
If your SharePoint intranet has grown complicated enough that nobody is quite sure what is actually published anymore, that is a governance problem worth solving properly. Our Microsoft 365 and Modern Work team helps organizations get SharePoint intranets back under control. Get in touch if that sounds familiar.