Playground →
At 0.80, Academy Sports + Outdoors is the strongest pull in Whataburger's top 10 — a sporting goods retailer sitting above every restaurant, grocer, and hotel in the set. That cross-category lead is the defining structural fact here.
The shape is broad: the top 10 span eight different categories with no subcategory appearing twice. H-E-B (0.76, grocery) and Pluckers Wing Bar (0.74, restaurant) follow Academy, then the set fans out into La Quinta Inns & Suites (0.73, mid-range hotels), the Houston Astros (0.73, sports teams), Perfumania (0.72, beauty retail), Cavender's (0.72, footwear), Specialty (0.72, specialty grocery), Valero Energy (0.72, gas stations), and ampm (0.71, convenience stores). No other QSR appears in the top 10 — Whataburger's own subcategory is absent from its nearest neighbors entirely. The cluster reads less like a fast-food competitive set and more like a cross-section of Texas-rooted, everyday-errand brands: fuel stops, sporting goods, a regional grocer, a mid-tier hotel chain. The scores compress tightly between 0.71 and 0.80, consistent with the broad shape — no single neighbor dominates, and the audience overlap is distributed evenly across a wide range of retail and leisure categories.
This audience shape suggests Whataburger draws from a wide, regionally anchored consumer base whose attention is spread across physical retail, sports, and convenience — not concentrated within the restaurant category.
