Most naming advice is taste. This is the exception: if a name rhymes with a cue you use, the animal has to guess which one you meant, and it will guess wrong at the worst moment. It is checkable, it is common, and almost no naming site mentions it.
Where the collision lives
In the stressed vowel, not the consonants. English cues are almost all one syllable — sit, stay, down, no, come, heel, off, wait, drop — and a one-syllable name sharing that vowel is the ambiguous case. Bo against no. Kit against sit. Ray against stay.
1,943 names in this catalogue are a single syllable, and a large share of them land on one of those vowels. Two-syllable names mostly escape the problem, which is one more reason 7,511 of the catalogue sits there.
The two-minute test
Write down the four or five cues you actually use — not the full obedience vocabulary, the ones you say daily. Read each shortlisted name aloud against them at the volume you would really use. Anything that rhymes goes.
Do it outdoors as well as indoors. What disappears at distance is the ending, so a name that is distinct across a kitchen can collapse into a cue across a field.
Why the site cannot do it for you
Because it depends on your cues, and those vary by household, trainer and language. A German household using sitz and platz has a completely different collision set from an English one. The catalogue classifies sound from spelling; it does not know what you say.
What it can do is narrow the field. Filter to two syllables, or to names ending in a vowel, and most of the problem disappears before you start reading aloud.
Should a pet name rhyme with a command?
No — that is the one naming mistake with a mechanism behind it. The animal has to disambiguate a name from a cue in the moment you most need it not to.
Which names clash with commands?
The one-syllable ones sharing a stressed vowel with a cue you use: Bo against no, Kit against sit, Ray against stay. It depends on your cues, so the test has to be run by you.
Do two-syllable names avoid it?
Mostly. English cues are one syllable, so a two-beat name is rarely mistaken for one — and 7,511 of this catalogue is two syllables, which is where most owners land anyway.
Every count on this site is a tally of real registrations: pet licences and shelter intakes published as open data by New York, Seattle, Austin, Montgomery County, Cambridge, Zurich, Basel and four Australian councils. Popularity here is the average share a name holds across those registers, so a name common in a small city is not buried by one common in a large one. Five of the eleven registers are North American and they supply 86% of the records, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.