Ive never used, and have very little knowledge of VPNs.

I used a state public records website for information lookup.

Part of the usage conditions is no "scripting" or automatic retrieval of information. Occasionally i will perform enough searches (manually) i will cease to be able to retrieve information for a few days.

Would a VPN likely prevent this lockout?

probably not, but there might be an angle.

the site’s rate limit mechanism is likely based on the frequency of requests from a given IP address.  when you exceed the limit, access is temporarily denied.

if you were to connect to your vpn service provider, download records until things stop, and then disconnect — you can then again download until things stop using your own IP.   so at this point you are at twice as many queries than before.  now, reconnect to your vpn service provider, and ideally the pool of addresses used at the provider end makes it such that you have a different vpn “egress” IP address.  now you can once again download until things stop.  lather rinse repeat.  

note that there are other mechanisms which may be used to backstop the IP address rate-limiting method; fortunately they are almost all under the control of your browser (and some plugins).  so, for example; you can dump your cookies or change the browser fingerprint at will.

Try it and see if it works. There is a free version of ProtonVPN available here: https://protonvpn.com/free-vpn/

I used to use this one until I upgraded.

Brave browser has "Private Window with Tor" You can generate an endless amount of source IPs with it for free.

thanks gentlemen.

just a note on that, Tor exit nodes are well-known — ephemeral or not, they are indexed and available for download for easy import into network- and application-layer packet filters.

example
https://www.dan.me.uk/tornodes

Exit nodes are lols, they are exits. Tor bounces your data between tor relays an unknown amount of time, that is why Tor is kinda of slow, its protecting your data.