This year-in-review reflects on what Trip achieved during 2025 and looks ahead to our plans for 2026. A major milestone this year was the launch of AskTrip, which has rapidly become a core part of Trip’s mission to support clinical decision-making. Alongside continued development of the main Trip platform, 2025 was a year of meaningful progress in how clinicians and information specialists access, explore, and use trustworthy evidence.

Trip

1) Impact

Over the past year, Trip experienced substantial growth, with a 60% increase in unique users and a 43% year-on-year rise in page views generated by clinicians and information specialists worldwide.

When viewed alongside our previously published impact evaluations – which showed that 40.77% of searches led directly to improvements in patient care – these usage figures suggest that Trip continues to play a meaningful and growing role in clinical decision-making and patient care globally.
(See: The impact of Trip parts 1 and 2)

2) New features

Systematic Review and RCT scores launched
We introduced scores for systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials, accompanied by a published critique of their strengths and limitations. This reflects Trip’s ongoing commitment to transparency, methodological rigour, and responsible use of evidence indicators.

Improved mobile interface
A redesigned mobile experience now makes Trip much easier to use on the go, supporting faster access to evidence at the point of care.

Expanded journal coverage
We added new journals to Trip, broadening coverage and strengthening the depth and breadth of evidence available to users.

Linking trials across the evidence ecosystem
Randomised Controlled Trials are now directly linked to their trial registrations and to relevant systematic reviews, allowing users to verify trial details easily and see how individual studies fit into the wider evidence base.

3) Blog activity and readership

Our blog activity increased markedly in 2025, with 91 posts published, compared with 34 in 2024, a 168% increase, driven in large part by the growing number of AskTrip-related posts.

This increase in output was matched by strong audience growth. The blog attracted 40,000 views from 23,700 visitors in 2025, representing a 44% increase in views (from 27,700) and a 57% increase in visitors (from 15,100) compared with 2024. Together, these figures point to both sustained publishing momentum and a steadily expanding readership for Trip’s writing on evidence, search, and clinical decision-making.

AskTrip

AskTrip launched on 25 June 2025, and it quickly became clear that it was meeting a real need. As we approach 10,000 clinical Q&As (a milestone we expect to reach by mid-January) AskTrip has significantly strengthened one of Trip’s core purposes: connecting clinical decision-makers with the best available evidence.

Since launch, we have learned a great deal and made numerous improvements to the service, with further substantial enhancements already planned for early 2026.

The AskTrip sub-site has been viewed nearly 100,000 times by almost 20,000 unique users, demonstrating that this growing repository of clinical questions is not only heavily used, but also valued as a distinctive resource in its own right.

Stepping back, it is hard not to feel a sense of excitement about what this represents. Trip was originally created in 1997 to support the ATTRACT clinical Q&A service, helping answer questions manually using the best available evidence at the time. Nearly three decades later, returning so strongly to clinical Q&A – now at scale, powered by a vastly richer evidence base and modern technology – feels like coming full circle. It is a powerful reminder of why Trip exists: to help clinicians ask better questions, find better answers, and ultimately improve patient care worldwide.

Looking ahead to 2026

Looking ahead, we already have a full and ambitious programme of work planned for 2026. A major focus will be on improving search, including the use of document chunking and a hybrid lexical–vector search approach. These techniques will enhance both core Trip search results and AskTrip answers by improving relevance, recall, and precision.

For the main Trip platform, we plan to significantly expand the number of indexed clinical guidelines and to explore indexing full-text journal articles, moving beyond abstracts to provide deeper access to the underlying evidence.

AskTrip will continue to evolve rapidly in early 2026, with several major enhancements already in progress:

  • Longer, more detailed answers
    Feedback from our user survey showed that around one third of users want deeper, more comprehensive responses. We are developing a system that allows AskTrip to deliver this when needed.
  • Support for follow-up questions
    Clinical questions rarely end with a single answer. We are adding functionality that allows users to ask follow-up questions or seek clarification, helping them continue their knowledge journey without starting from scratch.
  • Enhanced Beyond Trip searching using PubMed Central
    We plan to incorporate Google’s BigQuery vector search of PubMed Central into Beyond Trip. While this content overlaps with OpenAlex and Google Scholar, vector search will surface new, semantically relevant articles and improve how external evidence is incorporated into AskTrip answers.

Looking further ahead, there remain areas where we know we can do better, particularly for certain types of clinical questions. These include country-specific questions, where the academic literature does not always align neatly with national practice or policy, and recency-focused questions such as “What is the latest evidence for…?”, which place additional demands on how evidence is identified and prioritised. We have clear ideas about how to address these challenges, and they will become a focus once the current development programme is complete.

Trip delivered an extraordinary amount in 2025 – made all the more remarkable by the size of our team. What we have achieved this year is a testament not to scale, but to focus, commitment, and a shared belief in the value of trustworthy clinical evidence.

Huge applause goes to Phil, Abrar, AD, and Chris for their outstanding work throughout 2025. None are employees of Trip; all are contractors working part-time – and in some cases very part-time – making their collective contribution even more impressive. Their expertise, care, and persistence underpin much of what Trip and AskTrip have become.

We are also deeply grateful to our users and user group members, whose feedback, questions, and challenges continue to shape everything we do. Trip has always been built with its users, not just for them.

Finally, we have never been the loudest voice in healthcare – but we are quietly committed to helping clinicians make better decisions, every single day.