How to determine when the_loop is running?

Have you tried using is_page() and is_post_type_archive()?
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Conditional_Tags

esmi: I should have been much more specific, perhaps, sorry. Yes. We already are using is_page() and is_single() to determine whether or not we’re on the page or blog post permalink. But, even those pages call the_title numerous times such as in navigation, footers, and sidebars on many themes.

What we’d like to figure out is to only call our action hook in our plugin only for the actual blog post title and content but not in the navigation, footer, or sidebar.

There’s also in_the_loop() but I’m not sure how it would work if there was secondary custom loops in a sidebar or footer. Another approach might be seeing if you can grab the current template name and use that as a conditional.

esmi: Yes. in_the_loop will always return true in these cases.

@cdevroe – would this help? https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/is_main_query

jgclarke: Thanks so much! This fixes the issue in 90% of the cases we’ve been able to test against. Good enough! Thanks again.