So, basically instead of having one huge gatekeeper, we now have many smaller ones.

If you have browser with search suggestions enabled, everything you type in URL bar gets sent to a search engine like Google to give you URL suggestions. I would not be surprised if Google uses this data to check what it knows about the domain you entered, and if it sees that it doesn’t know anything, it sends the bot to scan it to get more information.

But in general, you can’t access a domain without using a browser which might send that what you type to some company’s backend and voila, you leaked your data.