Ask for the most popular pet name and most sites give you one answer. The registers give a different one for each country they cover, and the disagreement is the interesting part.
The leader in one country barely appears in another's top list. A name can dominate American licences and be almost absent from the Swiss ones, which means any single 'number one' is really a fact about where it was counted, not about naming everywhere.
Popularity is a share, not a survey
Every position here comes from how large a share of a register-source group a name holds, not from anyone being asked what they like. That is why the catalogue can show the ordering shift by country instead of flattening it into one global chart that would be wrong nearly everywhere.
Read the leader as local
The source list behind this site is North-American-heavy by record count, so a worldwide 'most popular' would mostly report American naming. The honest version is the one above: several leaders, each labelled with the place that produced it.
What is the single most popular pet name?
There isn't one. The leader changes between the American, Swiss and Australian registers, so the honest answer is several names, each tied to where it was counted.
Why does the top name change by country?
Because popularity here is a share of local register sources, and naming habits differ by place. A name common in American licences can be rare in Swiss ones.
Is the ranking a survey?
No. It is measured from public register-source shares, not from asking people what they like, which is why it can differ honestly by country.
Every count on this site is a tally of real registrations: pet licences and shelter intakes published as open data by New York, Seattle, Worcester, Victoria BC, Austin, Montgomery County, Cambridge, Zurich, Basel and seven Australian councils. Popularity here is a source-group share score, so a name common in a small city is not buried by one common in a large one. The source list is North American-heavy by record count, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.