The award recognized the GEO strategy Level built for Ancora Education to engineer content for AI retrieval at scale.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PITTSBURGH, PA — Level has been named a Silver winner in the Search category at The Drum Awards for Marketing. The recognized program, “Building the System,” documents a proprietary GEO strategy which proved that AI-generated search summaries require a fundamentally different content approach than traditional SEO.
The program was built in partnership with Ancora Education, the parent network behind multiple vocational school brands. Ancora serves adult career changers across trades and allied health fields, a high-consideration audience that increasingly encounters AI-generated search summaries before reaching any school’s website. The insight driving the program was structural: AI systems award citations to content that mechanically answers a query, not to content built to introduce a topic before answering it. Traditional SEO and AI-mediated search reward different things. Ranking rewards visibility. SERP features reward retrievability. Competing at the SERP feature level required a different production methodology.
Level responded by building a content writing system governed by seven enforced mechanics: decision-stage intent alignment, information gain constraints, outline engineering, entity and rule mapping, anti-fluff sentence standards, structured delivery, and freshness integration. Every piece of content produced under Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) principles is reviewed against all seven mechanics before it publishes. These are production standards, not editorial preferences.
The program was validated across two deployment modes: net-new content published against established publishers with years of domain history, and legacy content re-engineered from an existing base.
Berks Technical Institute: A net-new surgical technology exam preparation blog achieved +77.8% rank 1–10 keyword growth within two months, competing against dominant allied health publishers from zero domain authority in that query space.
Arizona Automotive Institute: A net-new welding blog reached 708 clicks and 126K impressions from zero, at an average search position of 4.8, with AI Overview appearances growing +44.4%.
STVT: A re-engineered HVAC blog delivered clicks from 260 to 2,919 (+1,023%), AI Overview appearances from 32 to 320 (+900%), and People Also Ask captures from 72 to 968 (+1,244%). That page is now the second most visited URL on the STVT site, behind only the homepage.
“Watching the STVT HVAC page climb to the second most visited URL on the site really validated our new blog writing system. Re-engineering an important blog that was struggling using our new GEO standards turned a low-traffic page into one of the site’s highest-traffic pages. That result is what I point to when clients want to understand if our process works.”
— Matt Beaulieu, SEO Manager, Level Agency
The Drum Awards for Marketing are among the most globally recognized honors in the industry. Silver in Search is awarded to work that demonstrates strategic rigor, a clearly defined methodology, and results that hold up under scrutiny.
About Level
Level is a digital marketing agency that partners with brands in complex, high-consideration markets, combining AI-enhanced strategy, media, and creative into one integrated system built to sustain and scale growth. The Level Intelligence Suite, Level’s proprietary AI platform, gives clients a predictive edge across every stage of the customer journey. Learn more at level.agency.
Media Contact
Brad Stephenson
SVP, Marketing & Sales Enablement
brad.stephenson@level.agency
