Type strains form the backbone of prokaryotic systematics as nomenclatural types of species and subspecies, and comparisons with established type strains are mandatory when classifying novel strains (PMID: 19700448).
The good news is that the TYGS is designed to automatically determine type strains closely related to your query genome(s).
On contrary, the term 'reference strain' is often used synonymously with the term 'type strain' but in fact the former term is not sharply defined and just an arbitrary label which can basically be put on any strain, even on those which are in fact no type strains. But this can lead to serious taxonomic confusions, if strains are falsely mistaken as type strains. That is, be careful when preparing your dataset and when collecting lists of 'reference strains' from other web pages.