[btrettel]

I think you're referring to a different Google Scholar feature than what I was referring to.

Google Scholar will periodically email me a researcher their AI thinks does work similar to me. For the most part this is close but not quite right. It sounds to me like this is what you're referring to.

I set up manual Google Scholar alerts for citations to papers of interest to me and some particular search queries. Many of these are unrelated to anything I have published, and they don't depend at all on my publications. I've heard of many interesting papers through these alerts.