A TXT record, as the abbreviation implies, is a record, which holds info in human-readable form and not code. It could be created for a domain or a subdomain for various purposes. Search engines like Yahoo, for example, have different ways of verifying you're the owner of a certain domain and one of them is actually by creating a TXT record with certain text which they provide and which you need to use as the record value. Exactly the same verification method is used by some analytics platforms that keep track of the traffic to your websites as well. Needless to say, in this case the content of the record is going to be read by a robot, but it'll still be in human-readable form. A TXT record is furthermore used if you activated the so-called SPF protection for your e-mails in order to shield them from being forged. In this case, the record contains information showing that a particular digital message is sent from a reliable and authorized mail server. You can use a TXT record for any kind of other information also, like your company details, for example.