In this work, aluminum doped zinc oxide (AZO) were deposited on pristine and self-assembled monolayer (SAM) modified glass substrates by chemical spray pyrolysis technique. The measurements of different parameters showed that modifying the surface of the glass substrates with the different SAMs resulted in excellent nucleation sites for the crystal growth of the AZO thin film. Among the different functional groups, SAMs with -CH3 terminal group improves the quality of the film remarkably, while the other groups improve the quality moderately. From the results we observed that our finding suggests a novel approach of improving the quality of AZO films deposited by spray pyrolysis technique. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.