A TXT record, as the abbreviation suggests, is a record, which holds data in human-readable form and not code. It could be created for a domain or a subdomain for many different purposes. Search engines, for example, have different ways of making sure that you're the owner of a given domain name and one of them is in fact by creating a TXT record with specific text which they provide and that you need to use as the record value. Exactly the same verification method is being employed by some analytics platforms that keep track of the traffic to your sites as well. Of course, in such a 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 also employed in case you enable the so-called SPF protection for your e-mails in order to shield them from being forged. In this case, the record contains info showing that a given electronic message is sent from a trusted and authorized mail server. You can use a TXT record for any kind of other information also, like your business details, for instance.