TXT
A TXT record holds a piece of text attached to a name, and nothing more than that. Unlike A, MX or the other records on this site, DNS itself gives that text no built-in meaning at all, a TXT record is a blank container, and every use it actually gets comes from some other system agreeing on what to put inside it and how to read it back.
| Name | Type | Value |
|---|---|---|
| (apex) | TXT | "google-site-verification=6P08Ow5E-8Q15DzT" |
Why this counts as a core record now
A generation ago, a working site and working mail needed little beyond an A record and an MX record. That's no longer true. Sending mail to any major provider without an SPF record, and increasingly without DKIM and DMARC too, means a real chance of that mail being rejected or binned outright, and all three of those live inside TXT records. Proving ownership of a domain to almost any external service, a hosting platform, an analytics tool, a certificate authority, commonly works the same way. TXT has quietly become as close to unavoidable as A and MX always were, which is why it sits here with them rather than waiting in a later group.
More than one at a time
A single name can carry several TXT records at once, and this is normal rather than a conflict: the example above, a site-verification token, might sit at the very same apex as an SPF record, with nothing about either one interfering with the other. A panel might display them stacked together or as separate rows, that's a display choice, not a DNS rule.
Long values, split into pieces
A single string inside a TXT record has a length limit, and some values, a DKIM key being the clearest example, are long enough to exceed it. When that happens the value is split into several quoted segments within the one record, which a reader rejoins before using it. Most panels handle this automatically the moment a long value is pasted in. The DKIM page covers this in more depth, since it's the record most likely to run into it.
Where this shows up elsewhere on this site
SPF, DKIM and DMARC, each covered on its own page under Mail authentication, are three specific, well-defined conventions for what to put inside a TXT record and how a receiving mail server should read it. None of the three is a DNS record type of its own, whatever a panel's own menu might suggest by listing them separately. The same pattern continues elsewhere: domain verification tokens, MTA-STS and BIMI, covered later, are TXT records too, each with their own convention rather than a mechanism DNS treats specially.