Aside for the browser storage, they also log every search request made from your browser. Since the only way to type a URL is to put it into the search bar, that means they get a log of every page you visit, how often you go there, how long yu spend there, etc. without triggering any other licenses or boxes.

The same profiling is done from Safari and other Chromium / Blink browsers that have the "awesome address bar"

I have read that when you visit a page with Analytics (which is like everywhere) Chrome has special handling so as to give them a more complete dataset without it being the browser that is officially collecting it.