We recently reported the laser-directed opto-thermophoretic deposition of gold nanospheres from an aqueous dispersion onto glass substrates , however, this approach could only function under a limited range of colloidal conditions, which could not be transferred to anisotropic particles such as AuNRs. Herein, the use of EtOH as a co-solvent is shown to enable opto-thermophoretic printing of anisotropic NPs. While optothermophoretic printing of AuNRs was not possible in aqueous solution, the addition of ethanol as a co-solvent not only enabled the printing of AuNRs of different size, but also greatly enhanced the speed of the process. Furthermore, the size and concentration of the polymer polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) was found to significantly impact both the speed of the assembly and the degree of NP assembly, which significantly impacted the SERS performance of the resulting micropatterns. Overall, this not only enables rapid optically-controlled micropatterning of anisotropic metal NPs onto substrates, but also reveals the importance of solvent composition in tuning the overall process of thermophoresis and adhesion to the substrate interface. This opens the door to further advances in optically-directed patterning of plasmonic substrates and nanofabrication in general. Gold nanorod synthesis. Small AuNRs (S-AuNRs, 16*60 nm, AR = 3.8) were synthesized following a previously-described approach . Seeds. Under very fast stirring at 30°C, 300 µL of NaBH4 (10 mM) were added to a solution of 50 µL of HAuCl4 (25 mM) and 4.7 mL of CTAB (100 mM). This solution was kept under slow stirring for 1 hour before use. Growth. 450 mg of bromosalicylic acid was dissolved under sonication in 49 mL of CTAB (50 mM). Then, under stirring at 30°C, 476 µL of AgNO3 (100 mM) and 10 mL of HAuCl4 (25 mM) were added. The reaction was followed by UV-visible spectroscopy in the 300-500 nm wavelength range with a 10 mm path length. When the absorbance reached 0.7, 1250 µL of ascorbic acid (100 mM) were added, followed by 800 µL of the previous seeds. After 4h at 30°C, the nanorods were centrifuged for 10 minutes at 10000 rpm and washed twice with CTAC (1 mM).