[9] Five live acoustic videos of "American Town", "Plastic Bag", "Magical", "Blue", and "When Will I Be Alright" were uploaded on YouTube shortly after the album was released.

[13] James Hall of The Telegraph gave the album five out of five stars and called it "meatier, more absorbing and more varied than the slightly monotonic Subtract", opining that "Sheeran sounds like a supercharged David Gray.

[19] Helen Brown of The Independent found that Sheeran "sticks to the busker'n'beats style that's made him the best-selling male artist of the past decade" and on the album he is "in mellow, misty-eyed mode, rather than the cringier dancefloor zone of Collaborations".

[16] On the negative side, NME's Thomas Smith wrote that "the nuance and specificity of his last album's songwriting is largely absent; instead Autumn Variations is akin to aimlessly swiping through Instagram, blurry snaps of followers' leafy happenings whizzing past in a distracted daze".

[18] Rachel Aroesti of The Guardian described the album as a "another occasion to despair at the colossal popularity of such proudly unimaginative, staunchly unoriginal and intellectually bereft music", with "dashed-off lyrics, half-arsed even by Sheeran's standards" and that "many don't rhyme, scan or even make basic sense".

[22] In the United States, Autumn Variations debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 with 62,000 album-equivalent units, which included 46,500 pure album sales, marking the highest debut of the week and the best-selling album of the week in terms of pure sales.