Dog Breed Selector Quiz
Eight questions about your lifestyle and preferences. We match you to one of 200 AKC pure breeds — and surface 10 dog names personalized to the same answers, not random breed defaults.
How the matcher works
Eight questions cover the eight dimensions that actually predict breed fit:
- Living space — apartment / yard / acreage
- Family — kids, other pets, household structure
- Daily exercise — how much time you can commit
- Owner experience — first-time vs seasoned
- Allergies / shedding — hypoallergenic requirements
- Grooming time — minimal vs daily / professional
- Personality preference — calm / playful / protective / independent
- Size preference — toy / small / medium / large / giant
Each answer carries weighted preferences across 16 trait dimensions per breed (energy, trainability, shedding, barking, grooming frequency, good-with-kids, good-with-other-dogs, openness-to-strangers, playfulness, watchdog instinct, adaptability, apartment-friendly, first-timer-friendly, cold tolerance, heat tolerance, hypoallergenic). The recommendations reflect your specific trade-offs — there's no "default best breed."
The 11 AKC-sourced trait scores come from the official AKC breed pages. The 4 derived traits and hypoallergenic flag are computed from those AKC scores plus AKC's own hypoallergenic-breed list. We currently cover 200 pure breeds — designer mixes (Goldendoodle, Cockapoo, etc.) are excluded since AKC doesn't publish trait data for them.
Frequently asked questions
How does the matcher work?
You answer 8 questions about your living space, family, exercise level, experience, allergies, grooming time, personality preference, and preferred dog size. Each answer carries weights against 16 trait dimensions (energy, trainability, shedding, etc.) for 200 pure breeds. The breeds with the highest combined match score are recommended. The 10 names you also see are pulled from our 11,000-name database, ranked by how many of YOUR preference categories each name fits — not generic breed defaults.
Why are the questions different each time?
There are 20 questions in the pool — for each of the 8 trait dimensions, multiple wordings exist. On each visit you get a random variant per dimension. Your recommendations stay consistent (same dimension, same answer choice maps to the same trait weight); only the question wording shuffles. Personality (the 4-way temperament question) is the one exception — it stays fixed because rephrasing it caused users to give inconsistent answers across sessions.
Where does the breed trait data come from?
The 11 trait scores per breed are scraped from the official AKC breed pages (energy, trainability, shedding, etc., 1-5 ratings). Four additional traits — apartment-friendly, first-time-owner-friendly, cold tolerance, heat tolerance — are derived from the AKC scores plus a small hand-curated hypoallergenic flag based on AKC's own hypoallergenic-breed list. Source attribution is in our breed atlas.
Why didn't Lab/Golden show up for "family with kids"?
They will if you tell the matcher you want a calm temperament with weekly grooming and prefer minimal shedding. If you say "playful + energetic" + "shedding fine," the matcher correctly recommends higher-energy social breeds like Siberian Huskies. The recommendation reflects the specific answers you gave — including the trade-offs they imply.
Are the recommended names actually different per user, or just random?
Different per user. Each of your answers maps to a set of personality categories — "calm" maps to Calm/Relaxed/Spiritual/Zen; "country yard" maps to Country/Hiking/Adventurous; "first-timer" maps to Adorable/Classic. Names are scored by how many of these categories they're tagged to in our database. So a "country + protective + experienced" profile gets names like Ryder, Archer, Ford, Rock, while "apartment + calm + small" gets Hope, Daisy, Angel, Lily.