Units on auto-explore will go straight for goody huts if they see them. However, when you get a map from a goody hut, and that map reveals another hut, they won't always go straight for the second hut when the hut is still in the fog of war. Also, like I said, auto-explore isn't the most efficient, since the scouts won't always end their turn on a mountain for maximum vision, some will go and backtrack to reveal just 1 tile that was uncovered, they like to walk on every single tile on the coast to reveal every possible sea tile, etc. And sometimes if there is a peninsula of jungle, you'll have a bunch of them all trying to uncover the same tiles.
For me, they seem to have a little better luck of finding huts and when you got 20+ scouts running around on a huge pangea map, auto-explore saves ALOT of time manually moving each one around. And I like to play an expansionist civ with no barbarians, so then you don't need to worry of barbs, unless some other civ popped open a hut.