If ChatGPT 5.2 were actually superior, developers wouldn't be overwhelmingly routing traffic to Gemini 3.1 Pro just 6 days after release.
I use openrouter.ai as the benchmark because it's the foundational API layer for innovator apps that are always the quickest to adopt new tech.
ChatGPT has 100x more interest on google trends than Gemini and OpenRouter combined, which in the context of this article is a much more relevant "popularity score".
But I don't think either are very meaningful when there are actual benchmarks to measure the quality of models on specific tasks.