The US v. Google antitrust case may be frustratingly shrouded in secrecy, but occasionally we get some fun nuggets. The quote above comes from an internal email sent by Google’s Jim Kolotouros, VP of Android Platform Partnerships. “Chrome exists to serve Google search,” he writes. “If it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”
I work in SEO and have had many URLs that are orphaned and I go to them directly. It wasn’t until I asked Google to index via Search Console, or had it added to a site map and pinged Googlebot, that it would get indexed. You can live check if a page is indexed by using the site operator and entering the URL.
If what you said was true, then even orphaned pages would be indexed from a visit and that just is not my experience as a professional.