We study thermodynamic properties, surface magnetization, specific heat and susceptibility of XY quantum chains with coupling constants following arbitrary substitution sequences. Generalizing an exact renormalization group (RG) transformation, originally formulated for Ising quantum chains, we obtain exact relevance criteria of Harris-Luck-type for this class of models. For two-letter substitution rules, a detailed classification is given of sequences leading to irrelevant, marginal or relevant aperiodic modulations. We find that the relevance of the same aperiodic sequence of couplings in general will be different for XY and Ising quantum chains. By our method, continuously varying critical exponents may be calculated exactly for arbitrary (two-letter) substitution rules with marginal aperiodicity. A number of examples are given, including the period-doubling, three-folding and precious mean chains. We also discuss extensions of the renormalization approach to a special class of long-range correlated random chains, generated by random substitutions.