The risk is that merging two pages that each rank can lose the rankings of the one whose URL or structure gets dropped, leaving you worse off than you were with two separate rankers. Consolidation is sold as a way to build one strong page out of two, but that advice skips the failure mode: if the merge does not fully absorb both intents and redirect cleanly, you do not get one stronger page, you get one page that ranks for less than the two it replaced. The pivot is whether the merged page genuinely takes on both intents and inherits the equity of both.
The failure happens on two fronts. First is intent coverage. Each ranking page earned its position by satisfying a particular intent, and if the merged page leans toward one intent and only gestures at the other, the abandoned intent’s ranking has nowhere to live and can simply evaporate. The new page competes well for what it covers fully and poorly for what it now covers thinly, so a query that one of the originals owned outright may slip away entirely.
Second is equity transfer. The dropped URL carries accumulated signals, including links and the standing it built, and those only flow to the survivor through a clean, relevant redirect to the page that actually covers that content. A missing redirect, a redirect to a loosely related page, or a structure that buries the merged-in content can break that transfer, so the equity that earned the original ranking does not arrive where it is needed. The result is a consolidated page that underperforms the sum of its parts.
So before you merge two pages that both rank, confirm two things: the combined page must fully cover both intents, not favor one, and every retired URL must 301 cleanly to the page that absorbs its content. If you cannot guarantee both, the safer position is to leave the two rankers in place, because two pages each earning their keep beat one merged page that drops half of what they were ranking for.