A survey of the live Jane Austen web as of May 2026, conducted to identify where austen.com is competitive, where it is being out-ranked, and which features would most move the needle. Each competitor was fetched and inspected directly; where a site refused fetches, fallback signals (search results, Wikipedia, press coverage) are noted.
Honesty notes: A few sites returned 403 (austenonly.com, jane-austens-house.com, janeausten.org) and we worked from public summaries. Pemberley shop status was read off the live homepage. Reddit was unreachable to this fetcher so community signals are not deeply sized. No traffic figures are invented — "vibe" rankings only.
| Site | Best at | Killer features | Cadence | Domain signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| janeausten.co.uk Jane Austen Centre, Bath |
Commerce + the physical Centre + the Festival | Full Shopify-style shop (books, jewellery, regency clothing, gifts); London & Bath ticketed experiences; Jane Austen Festival (largest in the world, Sept 2026); Regency Tearoom; 40-country multi-currency, 6 languages; very active blog (Regency Life, Media Reviews) | Active — multiple posts/week | Major. Institutional · Bath tourism · strong commercial SEO |
| jasna.org Jane Austen Society of North America |
Scholarship + societies + the AGM | Peer-reviewed Persuasions journal and Persuasions On-Line; monthly Austen Chat podcast; "Austen's World Up Close" member videos; The Austen Table (Regency recipes); essay contest; AGM in Tucson Oct 2026 (NA + P); >75 regional groups; member portal | Active — monthly+ | Major. Scholarly authority site, .org, heavily cited |
| janeaustens.house Jane Austen’s House, Chawton |
The objects + the place | Object collection (turquoise ring, topaz cross, writing table); ticketing; new permanent exhibition Jane Austen and the Art of Writing; Jane Austen 250 programming; StarPal.AI "Lizzy" avatar co-developed with UCA; education resources; museum shop on Shopify (jane-austens-house.myshopify.com) | Active — institutional | Major. Museum authority, .house TLD, heavy press |
| chawtonhouse.org Chawton House Library |
Early women’s writing scholarship | Digitised novels of early women writers; current exhibition HomeMade Histories (through Sept 2026); podcasts; reading groups; visiting fellowships; conferences; accommodation in North Wing | Active — institutional | Strong. Charity · scholarly · cross-linked to JAH |
| pemberley.com Republic of Pemberley |
Reference + gazetteer (legacy) | Gazetteer, character database, locations, L&T knowledge base, Bits of Ivory archive, digital texts, Pemberley Shoppe. Discussion boards CLOSED — moved to a Facebook group. Copyright still reads 2004–2021. The fan-fiction archive is not referenced on the current homepage. | Dormant homepage; community migrated to Facebook | Strong legacy domain, declining freshness |
| dwiggie.com Derbyshire Writers’ Guild |
Jane Austen fan fiction archive (JAFF) | Two-archive split — Epilogue Abbey (period-faithful) and Fantasia Gallery (modern/AU/experimental); DWG message board; Tea Room; JAFF Library; Baronetage author profiles. Self-describes as one of the oldest and largest JAFF archives online. | Active | Strong within JAFF niche |
| austenprose.com | Austenesque book reviews + author interviews | Laurel Ann Nattress’ long-running review blog; giveaways; anniversary reading lists; Austenprose PR (separate book-marketing arm); strong social cross-posting | Active — last post mid-Dec 2025; multiple posts/month around the 250th | Strong niche authority for new-release coverage |
| janeaustensworld.com | Regency life & travel essays | Rachel Dodge (literary travel) + Brenda S. Cox (church history); Elizabeth Bennet’s Travels series; Regency landscape gardening, social customs, Derbyshire deep-dives. Last post 12 May 2026. | Active — monthly | Strong long-tail SEO ("Regency <topic>") |
| austenonly.com | Was: Regency material culture | Site is currently private on WordPress.com — not publicly readable. Treat as dormant for competitive purposes. | Private / effectively dead | Legacy domain, no current signal |
| austenblog.com | Was: Austen-in-pop-culture news | TLS cert was invalid on fetch (CN/SAN mismatch). Site appears neglected at the infrastructure layer. | Effectively dormant | Legacy domain, declining |
| allthingsjaneausten.net | Was: general Janeite blog | Rita L. Watts. Last post June 2022. ~339 newsletter subs as of last visible snapshot. | Dormant since 2022 | Weak — legacy |
| austenconnection.substack.com Plain Jane / The Austen Connection |
Newsletter + 2026 read-along | The Great Jane Austen Read-Along 2026, year-long structured group read; free + paid tiers; Zoom meetups with guest hosts | Active — weekly | Rising. Substack discovery surface is meaningful in 2026. |
| janeaustenfirstdrafts.substack.com | Manuscript & juvenilia close-reading | All-Austen newsletter; hundreds of subs; deep-cuts focus | Active | Niche but growing |
| Wikipedia Jane Austen hub | Reference dominance | Main article + ~12 spin-out articles (Styles and themes, Reception history, Janeite, Jane Austen in popular culture, Causes of Jane Austen’s death, Timeline, Family and ancestry, etc.); family trees; complete works list | Active — continuous | Dominant. Almost always rank #1 for biography queries. |
| Project Gutenberg — Austen | Free e-texts in many formats | All six novels + Lady Susan, Love and Freindship, The Watsons, Letters, fragment of Sanditon; HTML / EPUB / Kindle / plain text. P&P alone: 112,000+ downloads. | Active — stable | Dominant for "read X online" queries |
| British Library — Jane Austen at 250 | Manuscripts + rare editions | 250th exhibition (Nov 2025 – Mar 2026); manuscripts and rare editions, including Persuasion. Page since rotated out (404 today). | Closed exhibit, but archived press | Major institutional brand |
| Podcast field | Audio Janeite community | Active shows: Bonnets at Dawn, First Impressions, The Thing About Austen, Pod and Prejudice, Reclaiming Jane, The Pemberley Podcast, Sips & Sensibility, What Would Jane Do?, plus JASNA's Austen Chat and the 250-launched A Jane Austen Year. | Active — very crowded | Strong combined search footprint |
| AI / interactive | Talk-to-the-characters | StarPal.AI × Jane Austen’s House × UCA Elizabeth Bennet ("Lizzy") avatar — on-site at the Learning Centre in Hampshire. Meta AI added Jane Austen as a celebrity-style character. DeepAI and YesChat have Austen-flavour GPTs. | New (2025–2026) | Emerging space — nobody owns it yet on the open web |
| austen.com (baseline) | Original-era fan site · complete texts · cross-network | Complete texts of all six novels with chapter indexes; annotated Mansfield Park & Emma; Lovers’ Vows play hosted; biography; adaptations hub; Lizzy’s Costumes archive (1995 BBC P&P); 7 evergreen novel reading guides; news desk (16+ articles in April–May 2026); store; cross-site index with firth.com; WholeTech network sub-nav; JSON-LD + llms-full.txt (Mythos-ready) | Active — news desk publishing in 2026 | Excellent domain (austen.com since 1997); under-developed against the field |
Ordered by likely impact on traffic, retention and prestige. Effort tier: S = a day or two, M = a week or two, L = a multi-week build.
Who has it: Pemberley (gazetteer), JASNA (essay archive), Wikipedia. Nobody has a clean Algolia/Lunr-style instant search across all six novels with chapter + character context.
Why: Every Janeite query ("what chapter does Darcy propose", "Mr Bennet quote about libraries") is a long-tail SEO goldmine. austen.com already hosts the texts — only needs an index.
Effort: M (Lunr or Pagefind, all client-side)
Who has it: Project Gutenberg (dominantly).
Why: "free download" intent is enormous; matching Gutenberg's formats at the canonical austen.com URL lets you intercept that traffic. Also a clean monetisation funnel into the store.
Effort: S (Pandoc one-time conversion from existing HTML)
Who has it: Pemberley has a static character database; nobody has a visual relationship graph.
Why: Shareable, embeddable, viral on Tumblr/Pinterest. Strong "Jane Austen character chart" search demand.
Effort: M
Who has it: Smithsonian once built one; Visit Bath has a downloadable audio tour. No persistent interactive map on a Janeite domain.
Why: Travel intent (Bath, Chawton, Lyme, Winchester, Box Hill, Pemberley filming locations) converts well and is highly linkable.
Effort: M (Leaflet/MapLibre + curated GeoJSON)
Who has it: LibriVox has free public-domain readings, but no Janeite site embeds and indexes them well; Jane Austen Bedtime Stories podcast covers the niche.
Why: Audio-readers + sleep-listeners are huge; LibriVox audio is free to embed; very low cost / high stickiness.
Effort: S
Who has it: The Austen Connection (Substack) is winning this lane right now.
Why: Retention engine — calendar drives return visits. Combine with email list to compound. Substack's read-along is owned by one person; austen.com can host the canonical free version.
Effort: S (static calendar) / M (with email + RSS)
Who has it: Dwiggie.com (the real archive); Pemberley used to.
Why: austen.com already claims the DWG archives. Either host an index, mirror permission permitting, or build the canonical "where is JAFF in 2026" hub. Massive long-tail.
Effort: S (index page) / L (host)
Who has it: Wikipedia has static family trees; nobody has a clean interactive one.
Why: "Jane Austen family tree" is a high-volume query and there's no good answer page.
Effort: M
Who has it: JASNA's The Austen Table owns this corner; janeaustensworld.com touches it.
Why: Food / Pinterest traffic is its own ecosystem; one well-photographed Regency white soup recipe outranks ten essays.
Effort: M
Who has it: Janeausten.co.uk sells Regency clothing; no site has a definitive cross-adaptation costume archive.
Why: austen.com already has Lizzy’s Costumes from 1995 BBC. Extend to 2005, 2020 Emma, 2022 Persuasion, upcoming Netflix P&P — nobody owns this and it's already half-built here.
Effort: M
Who has it: StarPal.AI / JAH (on-site only); Meta AI; DeepAI/YesChat (low quality).
Why: First open-web Janeite site with a quality Claude/GPT-powered character chat or text Q&A becomes the press story. Pair with Mythos llms-full.txt (already shipped) for citation traffic from Claude/Perplexity.
Effort: M (Claude API + retrieval over the six novels)
Who has it: Nobody at scale. Austenprose reviews individually; Wikipedia lists.
Why: "1995 vs 2005 Pride and Prejudice" is a forever-evergreen query. A side-by-side scene/cast/runtime/Rotten-Tomatoes table per novel is link-bait.
Effort: M
Who has it: Scattered across janeaustensworld.com posts; no canonical alphabetical glossary.
Why: Each entry is its own SEO entry, internal-link target, and AI-citation snippet.
Effort: S
Who has it: Pinterest is full of these; no Janeite site is the canonical source.
Why: Social shareability + back-links. Generate OG-image cards programmatically.
Effort: S
Who has it: Austen Connection + Austen First Drafts are eating this lane on Substack.
Why: The only way to compound an audience in 2026. Even a low-frequency newsletter captures email and beats algorithmic decay.
Effort: S (Buttondown / Listmonk on the droplet)
Who has it: ~15 active Austen podcasts; JASNA Austen Chat; Bonnets at Dawn dominates.
Why: Crowded but discoverable; even a chapter-by-chapter audio read-along uploaded as a podcast is a feed nobody else owns under austen.com.
Effort: M
Who has it: Nobody comprehensively for free; Harvard Annotated Editions are paywalled print.
Why: austen.com already has annotations for Emma and Mansfield Park. Extend to P&P, S&S, Persuasion, Northanger — instant authority moat.
Effort: L (curatorial)
Who has it: JASNA Persuasions On-Line owns this.
Why: Harder to dislodge JASNA, but a curated index of public-domain & open-access essays would still rank.
Effort: M
Who has it: Pemberley closed its boards; Dwiggie has one; Reddit r/janeausten; Facebook groups.
Why: Even a curated "where Janeites talk in 2026" page beats nothing. Don't host a forum unless committed; instead become the directory.
Effort: S (directory) / L (real forum)
Who has it: janeaustens.house and janeausten.co.uk own this commercially.
Why: The 250 wave continues through 2026; a free clearinghouse of every museum exhibit, festival, podcast and read-along catches all the press back-link traffic.
Effort: S
llms-full.txt is linked; the schema declares the Person and Organization
cleanly. austen.com is unusually well-prepared to be cited by Claude, ChatGPT,
Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — nobody else in this field has done that
work. This is the moat. Lean in harder.