A TXT record, as the abbreviation suggests, is a record, that contains data in human-readable form and not code. It can be created for a domain or a subdomain for a variety of purposes. Search engines like Yahoo, for example, have different ways of verifying that you are the owner of a particular domain and one of them is by creating a TXT record with certain text that they provide and that you need to use as the record value. The exact same verification method is being employed by some analytics platforms that keep track of the traffic to your web sites as well. Of course, in this case the content of the record will be read by a robot, but it'll still be in human-readable form. A TXT record is also used in case you enable the so-called SPF protection for your email addresses in order to shield them from being forged. In this case, the record contains data showing that a certain electronic message is sent from a reliable and authorized mail server. You can use a TXT record for any type of other information also, like your company details, for example.