A TXT record, as the abbreviation suggests, is a record, that holds information in human-readable form and not code. It may be created for a domain name or a subdomain for many different purposes. Search engines like Yahoo, for instance, have different ways of verifying that you are the owner of a certain domain name and one of them is by creating a TXT record with certain text which they provide and which you need to use as the record value. The exact same verification method is being employed by some analytics platforms that check the traffic to your sites as well. Needless to say, in this situation 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 activated the so-called SPF protection for your email addresses in order to protect them from being forged. In this situation, the record contains info showing that a certain electronic message is sent from a trusted and authorized mail server. You can use a TXT record for any sort of other information as well, such as your company details, as an example.
