how to track users without the user knowing?

I am having trouble figuring out how many unique visitors i am getting per day. right now I have no idea how many people are visiting my website. is it 0? is it 100? i dont know. it sucks because it's like flying blind. i get no feedback if my seo is working.
i have a banner on my website that says we track visitors. agree. disagree.
if the user clicks disagree, they are not tracked. if the user closes the banner, they are not tracked. the only way they are tracked is if they explicitly agree which most people dont bother doing.
i dont care about any privacy laws that say you cant track users as long as i cant be caught. with cookies, i can be caught because cookies is public. the user can analyze their browser and find out they are being tracked via cookies.
how do i make it so it's not possible for them to prove they are being tracked?

You own their browser. lol

you can do it server-side
track the IPs, sessions, pageviews etc
then you can have some sort of API to check if the IPs are trackers, crawlers, ai agents, residential ips, mobile ips, etc

and you can go from there

this should be easily done by something like claude + an IP API

Use server-side access logs and count approximate unique visits from requests, while filtering bots/crawlers. You can track pageviews, referrers, landing pages, UTM parameters, and approximate daily uniques without dropping marketing cookies or building persistent user profiles.