Your Craigslist post isn't showing up. Here's why, and what to do.

You wrote the ad. You paid the fee, if there was one. Craigslist emailed you a confirmation with a link that opens the post just fine. And when you go to the section and look for it — or search for your own title — it isn't there.

That's a ghosted post. It's the single most common Craigslist problem, and the site never tells you it happened.

First, confirm it's actually ghosted

Three quick checks, in order:

1. Open a private or incognito window and browse to the section and city you posted in. Sort by newest. Your post should be in the first page or two. Logged-in views of your own account don't count — you can always see your own ads there.
2. Search your exact title from that same incognito window. Ghosted posts don't appear in search results either.
3. Wait fifteen minutes and try again. New posts can take a few minutes to index, and a post with images sometimes lags a little longer. Anything past thirty minutes is a real ghost.

If it passes all three, you're fine. If it fails the first two after half an hour, read on.

What ghosting is

Ghosting is Craigslist's spam filter deciding your post shouldn't be shown, without deleting it or telling you. The ad looks submitted. Readers can't find it. From Craigslist's point of view this is efficient: a spammer who thinks the post went up keeps quietly wasting time instead of adapting.

The catch is that legitimate posts trip the same filter every day.

The usual triggers

The advice on the subject has been consistent for years, and it points at four things:

Behavior that looks like bulk posting. Many posts in a short window from one account. The same ad, or nearly the same ad, in several cities or categories. Several accounts posting similar ads from one connection. Craigslist's limit is one post per category per city every 48 hours, and it watches for anything that looks like an attempt to get around it.

Content that looks like spam. Titles in all caps or stuffed with symbols. Broken HTML from a pasted document. The same stock photo it has seen on a thousand other ads. Blocks of keywords at the bottom. Phone numbers written as "three-oh-five" to dodge filters — the filter notices that too.

Account and connection history. A brand-new account posting a business-style ad. An account that has had posts flagged before. A connection that other, ghosted accounts have used.

The wrong category. A services ad in gigs, a for-sale ad in community. Readers flag it and the filter learns.

Why the obvious fixes don't stick

The first instinct is to post it again. That's the worst move: it looks exactly like the behavior that got the post ghosted, and it usually gets the account throttled harder.

The second instinct is to wait a couple of days, rewrite the ad, and try once more. That sometimes works — once. The account and the connection carry their history with them, so the next ad that looks even slightly business-like starts from a worse position than the last one. After a few rounds the account is effectively dead, and the fix people land on is a new account, on a new phone number, on a different connection.

That's the moment a classified ad turns into a second job. You're no longer writing ads; you're managing accounts, numbers, and connections, and checking every post in a private window to see whether it exists. It's doable. It isn't worth your time.

What actually works

Ghosting is a volume-and-pattern problem, so it's solved with structure, not clever wording:

• Separate verified accounts per region, each used lightly and only where it belongs.
• One post per category per city per day, paced across the day, never in bursts.
• Ads reviewed before they go up: plain text, real photos, the section's fields filled in, contact details that match.
• A public-visibility check on every single post, so a ghost is caught the same hour instead of discovered a week later.

That is our standard operating procedure at Scale Classifieds, because it's the only version that holds up at volume. If a post doesn't appear, we don't count it as delivered and you aren't charged for it. If Craigslist removes a live post within 7 days, we repost it once at no charge.

Start an order, or see why posting got so hard in the first place.