•The concept of attention is critical for understanding human behavior and thought.•Alerting, orienting and executive control are 3 putative brain networks of attention.•The Attention Network Test (ANT) was created (circa 2000) to assess these networks.•Since 2000, the ANT has been widely used and many variants have been developed.•Inspired by the work of M. Posner, the evolution and future of the ANTs is discussed. Attention is a pivotal cognitive function and efforts to understand its properties and operations are fundamental. Building upon the best known taxonomy of attention put forward by Posner and colleagues, the Attention Network Test (ANT) was designed to efficiently provide scores that reflect the efficacy of alerting, orienting and executive control. The ANT has not only been very widely adopted by scholars around the world, it has inspired a wide range of variants, the ANTs, - each with its own purpose. This review will describe the origin of the ANT in the taxonomic contributions of Posner and the evolution of the ANTs with some discussion of the nature and rationale for each major variant described here. We briefly allude to minor modifications of the ANT and present some suggestions related to data reporting and data analysis. We end with some projections about the future use of the original ANT and its notable variants.