The identification of a class of AGN transients that are smoothly evolving on year-long timescales raises interesting questions regarding the underlying cause. These ‘hyper-variable’ AGN may simply be at the extreme end of the tail of typical AGN variability or, perhaps more interestingly, there may be an extrinsic cause. Out of a number of plausible scenarios, the focus for this work is on the possibility that some of these AGN transients are actually rare, high-amplitude microlensing events. If so, through analysis of multi-epoch spectroscopy and simple lensing models, we have the potential to uncover valuable information on the inner-most regions of these enigmatic objects.