Answering questions of Y. Rabinovich, we prove "stability" versions of upper bounds on maximal independent set counts in graphs under various restrictions. Roughly these say that being close to the maximum implies existence of a large induced matching or triangle matching (depending on assumptions). A mild strengthening of one of these results is a key ingredient in a proof (to appear elsewhere) of a conjecture of L. Ilinca and the first author giving asymptotics for the number of maximal independent sets in the graph of the Hamming cube.